Old foreman told me my tuckpointing was too clean, changed everything

I was on a job in downtown St. Louis last summer restoring an old brick warehouse. The foreman watched me finish a section and said, "Looks like a machine did it, that's the problem." He pulled me aside and showed me how to slightly stagger my joint depths and leave a tiny bit of excess mortar here and there. Now I aim for that 100-year-old look instead of perfect straight lines. Any other guys here get told to make their work look worse on purpose?

2 comments

2 Comments

umab867d ago

Yeah the 'looks like a machine did it' comment hits home for me. I had a similar thing happen when I was doing restoration work on some old brownstones out in Brooklyn. My boss at the time actually took a chunk of my perfectly done pointing and smeared a bit of extra mortar into it with his thumb, then said 'there, now it looks like a person did it 80 years ago, not a robot last week'. I thought he was crazy at first but he was right, the whole point is matching the old work, not showing off how perfect you can make it. These days I always keep a little water in my brick and barely tool the joints where it won't show, just to get that slightly irregular look. Nobody's paying for museum quality tuckpointing on a 120 year old wall, they want it to blend in like it never happened.

parkerb757d ago

I actually see it the opposite way. The whole point of restoration work is that it lasts another 100 years, and sloppy joints just let water in faster. I've seen too many old buildings where someone tried to "match the old look" and ended up with mortar that crumbled in five years because it wasn't packed tight enough. Water finds those weak spots every time. You can still get an irregular look with careful tooling and proper mortar mix, but the actual joint needs to be solid or you're just creating future problems. Good restoration means it blends in AND holds up, not one or the other.