New (very old building) shop

[Lynn]

After getting the dividing wall rocked on one side (the warehouse side), I wanted to get the other side spray foamed along with the inside of the North wall in the shop. But first I felt like I needed to get all the brick work squared away. There were a lot of loose bricks and a lot of crumbling mortar. Part of it is just age, but part is that the building had been victim to a fire before WWII. There had been some previous attempts to repoint the bricks, but it was not done very well at all. There is really only one way to do it right; you have to dig out ALL of the soft mortar, and tightly pack in new mortar. After paying a relative AND a professional mason to do the job, I decided to do it myself.

All of the pics in this post are AFTER the other guys had supposedly fixed it. All the white chalky mortar is so soft, you can dig it out with a fingernail. You can see in a couple of pictures, there is some new gray mortar next to the white stuff. The professional mason? He didn't do it, but had a couple "helpers" do that work. All they did was put mortar on a finger and push it into existing voids. They did not remove any of the old mortar. That wheel barrel? It is one of THREE full loads of old mortar that I dug out by hand in prep for new mortar.

On most of the lower section (where previous “repairs” had be performed) they had just taken mortar in hand and slathered it over all the bricks with voids between them. It was ugly. So, on that part, I used a hand held concrete grinder and ground down to the brick. Then I started digging out the mortar. Most of the mortar from that “repair” was really hard, so where it was stuck in the brick, I just left it. I only dug out what would come out with a screwdriver or paint scraper. Went through about 5 paint scrapers; and that screwdriver won’t likely ever drive a screw again. I kept sharpening it at the grinder.