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Service
Masonry Restoration & Tuckpointing
Mortar joint restoration, brick replacement, and full facade tuckpointing for Chicago commercial and residential masonry buildings. Inspection through construction, one contract.
Chicago Masonry
Chicago Masonry
Chicago brick has survived 100+ freeze-thaw cycles a year for over a century. The mortar takes the hit so the brick doesn't have to — but mortar is sacrificial by design. When joints open up, water finds the lintels, and that's when the real damage starts. Lake Michigan keeps the wall assembly wet, chlorides from road salt accelerate embedded steel corrosion, and rusted lintels expand until they shove brick off the face. Forty-six percent of Chicago's housing stock predates 1940 — soft common brick, lime-putty mortar, steel that's been absorbing salt for decades. The facade ordinance exists because this isn't cosmetic. Miss a required cycle on a building over 80 feet and you're looking at $200–$500 daily fines. Emergency shoring after a failure runs triple what planned restoration costs.
What We Look For
We hang the swing stage, cut probes, and measure joint depth, mortar profile, brick absorption, lintel camber, and every moisture path across the elevation. We lab-test the original mortar for compressive strength and aggregate color so the replacement isn't harder than the brick. Every opening gets a lintel inspection — cracked mortar over a rust-jacked angle iron is a warning sign, not the problem itself.
How We Restore It
We grind deteriorated joints to at least three-quarter inch, blow them clean, pre-dampen, then pack new mortar in lifts matched to the original lime content. Spalled faces come out and get replaced with brick matched for size, color, and suction rate so the wall doesn't checkerboard. Corroded lintels get sandblasted or swapped before we repoint — otherwise the crack comes back next winter. One crew handles staging, demo, masonry, and cleanup. No handoffs, no excuses.
The Wrong Mortar Destroys the Building
The most common tuckpointing failure in Chicago isn't deterioration — it's the last repair. Most of the city's pre-war buildings went up with soft common brick and lime-putty mortar — a system designed to flex, breathe, and shed moisture without cracking. The mortar is intentionally softer than the brick. It's sacrificial by design. Contractors using standard Portland cement on pre-war masonry create a harder joint than the brick itself. Moisture that would have migrated through the joint gets trapped in the brick face. One freeze cycle and the face spalls. We've seen parapet walls rebuilt with Portland cement that disintegrated in four to six years — on buildings whose original lime mortar lasted a century. We lab-test the original mortar before specifying the replacement. Compressive strength, aggregate color, calcium carbonate content, joint profile. The replacement must be compatible with the substrate — softer than the brick, matched to the original binder chemistry. On pre-1920 buildings, that means lime-putty or natural hydraulic lime. If your last tuckpointing job used gray mortar on century-old yellow brick, the clock is already running.
What Deferral Actually Costs
Masonry deterioration is exponential, not linear. Typical tuckpointing runs $9–$25 per square foot depending on elevation height, access rigging, and mortar spec. That's the window — when joints are receding but intact. Wait a few years and water enters the wall assembly. Efflorescence shows up on the interior. Lintels start to corrode. Now you're adding lintel evaluation and selective replacement on top of repointing. Wait longer and freeze-thaw fractures saturated brick faces. Rust-jacking pushes courses out of plane. The scope becomes full facade restoration — emergency shoring, DOB violation, daily fines. Every year of deferral multiplies the cost. A condition assessment tells you exactly where each elevation sits on this curve — and what it costs to address now versus next budget cycle.
One Firm. Full Scope.
We document the failure, engineer the repair, and run the crew — all under one contract. No third-party markup. No "we'll get back to you." When the city asks for the report or the board wants a timeline, you already have both.
Craftsmanship
Mortar Matched to the Original
Color, compressive strength, aggregate, joint profile, and tooling — matched to the existing masonry so the repair disappears into the original wall. On century-old buildings, that means lime-based mortar formulated to protect soft common brick, not damage it.
Service Experts
Your Project
Team
Tom Bartosiewicz
Construction Principal
“Tom came up through heavy civil — roads, bridges, infrastructure — before turning that engineering discipline loose on Chicago's building stock. Three thousand projects later, he still walks every site before his crews touch it. Mortar joints, membrane failures, corroded lintels — he reads a facade the way most people read a blueprint. His team doesn't patch problems. They fix root causes.”
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Christi Malone
Building Inspector, Architect
“Christi is the firm's lead building inspector. She has been inspecting Chicago buildings since 2015 — facade condition assessments, structural evaluations, ordinance compliance reviews — after two decades practicing architecture. She holds a Master of Architecture from Arizona State and knows what failure looks like before it reaches the surface: the hairline crack that means embedded steel is corroding, the efflorescence that traces a moisture path, the mortar joint that's taken one too many Chicago winters. Her inspection reports are where every scope of work begins.”
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Darren Flynn
Managing Principal
“Darren started in construction and spent fifteen years on Chicago rooftops — steel, waterproofing, structural framing — learning every system in the building envelope from the top down. In 2009 he founded the firm. Today he runs a 60-person operation with in-house architects, engineers, and tradesmen, all under one contract. Twenty years in construction taught him one thing: if you're managing the building, you shouldn't have to manage the contractor too.”
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