Tuckpointing - attempt #1

It's been a now time since I've gotten around to posting on my blog, and that's partially because I lost some momentum with all of the other things that were going on this summer. But somewhere around June 20th, my dad and I decided to tackle a little tuckpointing (or more correctly repointing) of the stone foundation on the back corner of the building. True be told we just kind of jumped into it and started pointing based on my dad's knowledge from when he was growing up. We bought some pre-mixed mortar from Home Depot and went to work on the low stuff that we could get to easily.

These were taken after we'd finished but before it had drier completely. It ended up drying a little bit lighter color-wise than we liked and due to our inexperience we smeared a lot of the mortar on the stone faces as we were brushing it. Not the best job, but we learned something and next time will be much better. Here is a picture of part of the wall that we didn't get to that shows just how missing the mortar was before we started. It's worse around the very base where it meets the dirt.

Another good thing that came from all of this amateur tuckpointing was that we got a push in the right direction from my neighbor in terms of what to use next time. He said that the mortar we were using was too hard for historic brick. Luckily we mainly stuck to the stone foundation that will be able to handle the harder mortar premix, so this work should be fine. But my neighbor pointed out that on the softer red brick we'll need to hand mix a different blend that can't be bought in stores. Good to know for any other amateurs out there. We were using either Type S or N (can't remember) when we'll need Type O or even K for the softer historic bricks. A great resource for why that is and a crash course on tuckpointing historic buildings can be found at: http://www.nps.gov/tps/how-to-preserve/briefs/2-repoint-mortar-joints.htm

Eventually I'll get around to tuckpointing the entire building, but I learned firsthand that it's going to take a long time. I'm still not sure how I'll get to the higher 4th story places that need work; especially on the side of the building over my other neighbor's roof. I'm envisioning repelling from the roof, a la rockclimbing, as opposed to building scaffolding and getting my neighbor's permission to build it on his roof (a boom crane won't be able to reach and everything is on a hill/slant).  Probably a project for next summer at the earliest.