Ours is a brick home. Forty, perhaps fifty years ago a previous homeowner decided to build a brick staircase leading up to our front door. When we moved in a quarter century ago they were in a state of disrepair.
They were not, however, my first fix up project. Our house had some poorly maintained wooden railings and was in dire need of a paint job. I painted the interior and much of the exterior meaning the window frames and wooden fixtures. The steps kept getting worse.
In 1998 when I was serving my third year on the school board a fellow knocked at my front door and said my chimney could use a little tuck pointing. Never having paid attention to my chimney before I indicated I wasn’t interested but did ask him if he could fix the stairs. He said he could.
Mr .Davidson (and my brickwork) became my project for the year. It was a great way for me to turn off the teacher’s strike that loomed as our teacher’s union fumed over the creation of the Edison Charter School and gloried in the departure of the Superintendent that let it in and the recent election which put it within one vote of having a pliant school board majority.
Mr. Davidson had blown in from out of state. He and his girl friend sat down under a hot June sun and patched up our steps. It was a patch job. The mortar didn’t match the original. New unmatching bricks had to be bought to replace fractured brick. Nonetheless, when the job was done a week or so later I didn’t have to fear a liability suit from someone falling down a decrepit stairway.
When Mr. Davidson was done I paid him and he then mentioned that he had noticed that a few of our home’s bricks had deteriorating mortar. Would I like it fixed he asked. Without asking too many questions I agreed. When I came home after his first afternoon’s work on the house I was appalled. He had taken a product called quickcrete and filled up all the joints on the bottom three feet of our homes front side with it. They were stark white whereas the previous mortar was an almost invisible earth tone.
Knowing what I know now I could have spend a week removing the stuff and been much better off at little cost to myself. Instead I was in for one of those things we refer to as a good learning experience.
Thinking that there was no turning back I decided that the only solution was to “fix” the mortar all over the house. Today I’m pretty sure that 95% of it was just fine. Back then I took Mr. Davidson at his word that it was in need of repair. I pointed out to him that he had filled a half inch recess in each “joint” (where the mortar is placed between bricks) with his quickcrete and asked him to do the same as he continued working on the rest of the house. I had decided to let him finish the house rather than leave it with a whitened rim around the bottom. It would be god awful expensive. The next day I came back saw the bottom six feet of my homes side with whitened mortar. It was just as shocking as the front.
Mr. Davidson was in the process of raking out the mortar he had put in as we had agreed. I thought that leaving a recess in the joints would somehow keep my home a little more authentic. It just seemed to slow down the work and I was busy calculating the extravagant expense. No matter whether the joints were raked out or filled up the joints were now to be a stark white. I asked Mr. Davidson if he would be willing to teach me how to tuck point so that I could work side by side with him and lower my payment to him according to my portion of the work. He said that would be fine. We scrapped the whole raking thing inbetween joints. We would simply fill them flush with the bricks.
Now Mr. Davidson got serious. He shelved the quickcrete and ordered bags of portland cement and white sand. He mixed the two in a ratio he taught me and together we proceeded to tuck point my home.
Working side by side I asked him about his past and learned of his fly by night background. It led me to want to keep working on the project I could no longer stop for aesthetic reasons but I had no reason to doubt we were doing the right thing. I rather thought my working side by side with him would keep him from ripping me off.
Mr. Davidson could not live on what my house would pay him and he went about securing other work. Once I got the swing of things that was OK with me because it meant I could do more of the work myself and pay him less as he turned to other jobs. I think I ended up doing about 70% of the whole house myself. I saved money – apparently and I kept in touch with Mr. Davidson and his now pregnant girlfriend. Mr. Davidson was struggling to become a real businessman and I was determined to help him. My family thought I was crazy to trust him but I was full of Sunday School good will. I loaned him some money at times when he was juggling other jobs. I once wrote a $500 personal check to give to some folks he needed to return an advance to when he was unable to begin work on their house. I never got that money back from Mr. Davidson and I was a little amused a year later when the folks who had collected my five grand put the lawn sign of my next opponent in their yard. When Mr. Davidson’s son was born my wife and I went to a small shower for his girl friend. I even quit work on my house a couple of times to help him work on other homes he was having a hard time finding time to complete. I worked for free just to help him out.
I was quite happy to continue my own tuck pointing by myself. It saved me money and it took my mind off the ill will of a looming teacher’s strike. I worked into the fall up until the first few frosts before I was done. A year later Mr. Davidson left town and I suspect another crop of unhappy customers. It was about that time that I heard a story on National Public Radio of the disastrous consequences of using Portland Cement for mortar. It seems it was so strong that bricks would crumble away if they had it between their joints. For the past thirteen years I’ve looked at my bricks waiting for them to begin spalling.
In all the time since then my front steps have continued to deteriorate. In 2003 in advance of my daughter’s wedding I fixed them again. By April of this year I decided they really needed to be fixed once and for all. No more patching. I made some calls. I wanted them to be brick but I suspected pouring concrete would be a lot cheaper.
It’s now 4 AM and I’ve gotten the blogging bug out of my bloodstream – perhaps for the next week. Let me cut to the chase.
I chose to spend a lot more money to brick the steps. I’ve definitely chosen the right masons – JB Martin. My wife and I checked them out on on Angies List. Its early in the construction season and they were eager for the work partly because everybody knows our house and their work would catch more notice. Its good advertising.
At first I was only going to do the staircase but I learned that the NPR story was absolutely right. My bricks had not begun crumbling away but there were some major cracks along portions of the old mortar. Water was leaking in through them and degrading mortar on the inside of the brickwork. Over time I would have had brick falling off the sides of my home. JB Martin offered me a deal if I would let them grind out the old mortar and do the house as well as the staircase. They even handed me a grinder so I could see how tedious a job it would be. They did this because I explained how it was that Portland Cement had come to be used as mortar on my house and I was thinking about undoing the damage I had self inflicted year’s earlier.
Thirteen years on I can better afford to have the mostly unnecessary work I did undone. Its a trip and a half to Australia or a totaled Lexis but its better than waiting until my house is skinned alive. And I’m getting a beautiful new staircase.
I’m also getting weeks of grinding away at the portland cement which apparently seeped into the mortar it was laid atop making it also rock hard. Its not just a half inch that is being ground away but more like an inch of mortar. Under the circumstances it has been a vacation to work over at my daughter’s house and will continue to be for the next two weeks until my house is fixed up. I’m escaping a constant whine, like a never ending dental job and copious clouds of dust which have given my patio a ghost-like quality.
I’ve still got a garage to clean up and my wife and daughter will have gardening to do. At our home we will have to blow off a layer of dust to find our flower beds. I’m in no hurry.
We live just outside the new historic district that was designated by the City of Duluth. Even so we’d like to keep out little portion of Duluth in good order in the face of all the student rentals taking over our neighborhoods. It never hurts to set a good example. I just which I had never spent 1998 creating the need to set it.
