Lindsay is a smaller city made up mostly of houses with yards, and the calls we get here match that. We see older homes with brick chimneys and mortar that's worn thin, block walls along the yard that have started to crack or lean, and newer houses where the owner finally wants the walkway or patio they've been putting off. We do the same work in Woodlake and Exeter, so Lindsay is a short trip for us.
These are homes people live in, not bare lots, so most jobs start by working around what's already there. A garden bed, a fence line or a driveway you still need to use shapes where we stage material and how we dig more than anything else.
What sets the price and the schedule
The price on a masonry job mostly comes down to how much wall or surface there is, what it's built from and how much old work has to come out first. Brick and natural stone cost more to buy and lay than block, and a wall that needs a new footing, the concrete base it sits on, costs more than one that only needs fresh mortar. The schedule turns on our calendar, when the material arrives, and giving new mortar time to set before anything leans on it. I come out, look at the job myself and write your figure down, so you're comparing real numbers.
Repairing older brick without tearing it out
On older brick, the mortar usually wears out long before the bricks do, so the usual fix is to grind out the worn joints and pack in fresh mortar, which we call tuckpointing. We match the new mortar to the old as closely as we can in color and strength, because mortar that's harder than the brick around it can crack the brick over time. If a crack is old and isn't moving, I'll tell you it can wait. I'd rather fix what's actually failing than tear out good work, and I'll explain why before we touch anything.
Getting the yard ready for a new wall
For a new yard wall or a foundation block wall, the work starts with where the wall runs and how we get material to it. Block, sand and mortar come on pallets, so we look at gate widths, the driveway and anything planted along the line before we dig for the footing. Tell us what you want kept and we'll work around it. A small crew and I do the work, and I'm on site while it's done. When the wall's up, we clean the site and haul off the dirt, so the yard looks the way we found it, just with the wall.