Problem
At this house, the primary concern the customer had when contacting our company is that the bricks are leaning away from the house toward the top of the wall where the bricks meet the siding.
If you look along the sides of the windows in the FIRST photo where the window frame meets the bricks, you can see a gap that gets larger as it goes up.
This house was nearly 100 years old and has experienced many seasons of expansion or contraction of the soil beneath the home. However, on its own this wouldn’t cause the bricks to move out of their original position.
If you look at this photo where all the bricks have been removed, you can see that there are only 5 brick ties about 3’ above the foundation which were connecting the bricks to the stud wall of the home. This is grossly insufficient.
The solution:
We removed all of the bricks in the affected area. Cleaned
and stacked them for reuse. Then once we verified the wall
materials behind the bricks were in good condition, we
installed Tyvek moisture barrier and a sufficient number of
brick ties. All brick ties were nailed into the vertical 2×4
studs.
Then the bricks were reinstalled, bending every single brick
tie into the mortar joints as we go.
In this particular situation, the bricks on the house had been painted previously. Brick mortar has a 28 day cure time and therefore the customer must wait for this period of curing to pass before repainting the area of repair. To offer a better appearance during this interim period, we colored the mortar to be similar to the brick paint color. This will make the repair less noticeable until the customer can repaint.
