Tuckpointing attempt #1

After getting the estimate and advice of my dad's cousin on the tuckpointing, I called in my dad for a little crash course. He had worked as a laborer for brick masons a couple of blue moons ago, and I knew he'd enjoy it. We headed to Home Depot and I got all of the tools that I needed to start what will be a long drawn out tuckpointing job of the back of my building.

Unfortunately this is the only picture that I have of it from before, but we didn't get very far and there will be plenty of time to chronicle the rest of the work. We only did the bottom edge of the stone foundation, which as I later found out turned out to be a good thing.

This last picture gives you a little bit of an idea of what we were starting off of and what we still have to do.

After we had finished our first attempt at tuckpointing, I got a text promptly from my neighbor who is a former bricklayer wanting to talk to me before I did any more. We had kind of rushed into our tuckpointing work and hadn't though about the right materials to use. He pointed out to me that the mortar that we had used, Type S, was much harder than the bricks that we were eventually going to get up to on our tuckpointing. Luckily almost all of the tuckpointing that we had done was on the stone foundation where Type S mortar was the correct thing to use, so it wasn't a problem yet. He told me that in order to tuckpoint the rest of the building that I'd need to hand mix my mortar with the right specifications so that I wouldn't put the brick at risk of deteriorating. The mortar must be softer than the units (bricks) so that it is sacrificed first upon deterioration instead of the bricks themselves. My brick mortar will need more lime in it versus cement so I'll need Type O or K, which apparently isn't common enough to be sold pre-mixed so I'll need to mix the right proportions with sand myself.

Much more to come on the tuckpointing front, so stay tuned.