Brick and mortar joint watch
Annual · typically July
Why it matters
If your house has brick — walls, veneer, foundation, or a chimney — the mortar joints are wearing out on purpose. That's the design: mortar is softer than brick so the joints erode and get renewed every 50–100 years while the brick lasts centuries. Your job is the watching; the trade's job is the renewal.
Freeze-thaw is what turns receding joints into structural problems here — water sits in an open joint, freezes, and wedges. Every year of delay compounds through about 60–120 freeze cycles.
What skipping it costs
$800–$25,000
Mortar joints are the sacrificial part of a brick wall — soft on purpose, so weather eats the joint instead of the brick. Ignore receding joints and water gets behind the wall: spalling faces, rusting lintels, leaning sections. Repointing a wall runs hundreds to a few thousand; rebuilding one runs $25,000. And the wrong repair — hard mortar in soft brick — costs more than no repair at all.
Two ways to get it done
Do it yourself
You'll need: Flathead screwdriver or car key, Binoculars for high walls, Phone camera.
- Walk every brick surface once a year with a screwdriver. Scratch a few mortar joints per wall: sound mortar resists; failing mortar rakes out like damp sand.
- Look for the progression: hairline-cracked joints → joints receded behind the brick face → open gaps. Photograph with dates; year-over-year is how you see movement.
- Note spalled brick (faces popped off) and rust stains under steel lintels above windows and doors — rusting lintels expand and crack the courses above, and they're a fix-now item.
- Check that weep holes (the open head joints near the wall base and above lintels on veneer walls) are clear and open. Never caulk them — they're the wall's drainage.
- Step cracks that run diagonally through joints and widen seasonally aren't a mortar problem — they're a foundation-movement flag. Different card, different pro.
Hire it out
$600–$2,500National fair range — local labor moves this number.
Repointing runs $600–$2500 for typical problem areas — full walls scale up from there, priced by access and joint depth. A real mason grinds or rakes joints out by hand to proper depth, matches the mortar's hardness and color to the original, and can say the words "lime mortar" without being prompted. That vocabulary check is your cheapest quality screen.
Sequence matters: fix water sources first (gutters, grading, crown caps), then repoint, then let the wall breathe. Anyone selling waterproof sealer as the finish coat is bottling the problem inside the brick — breathability isn't a preference, it's how masonry survives.
Ask the tech
- What mortar mix are you using, and how did you match it to what's in the wall?
- Are you grinding joints out by hand or with a grinder — and how do you protect the brick edges?
- Which walls actually need repointing versus just monitoring for a few more years?
Red flags you're being upsold
- Hard portland mortar going into a pre-war wall. Old brick needs soft lime-rich mortar; modern hard mix makes the BRICK sacrifice itself instead of the joint — it destroys the wall it's supposed to save.
- Sandblasting or pressure-washing brick, ever. It strips the fired face and turns brick into a sponge. There is no version of this that's fine.
- Caulk smeared into weep holes or mortar joints 'to seal the wall.' Masonry walls are designed to breathe and drain; sealing them traps the water inside.
Second opinion time: Any repointing quote over $3,000, and always for structural claims — step cracks get an engineer's eyes before a mason's trowel.
The call
DIY the annual scratch test and photos. Repointing is genuine trade work — hire a mason who talks about lime content unprompted, and walk away from anyone with a sandblaster.