About Gateway Brick & Tuckpointing

How a job runs from your first call

You call or send the form with the address, the age of the building if you know it, and what you are seeing. Photographs help, especially of cracks and of anything above the roofline. We come out, walk every elevation, probe joints at several heights, look at the chimney, the sills, the lintels and the parapet, and photograph everything that matters.

Then you get a written scope. It names each elevation, the square footage, the joint depth and the mortar mix. Prices are broken out by area and by item, so you can see what each part costs and decide what happens this year. The photographs are yours whether or not you hire us.

What we promise on every job

We mix mortar to suit the building. On pre-1930 common brick that means a lime based mix that stays softer than the brick, so the joint remains the sacrificial part of the wall.

We cure and show you color samples before the wall is touched. Test boards mixed with local sand, cured properly, held against your masonry in daylight. Wet mortar reads darker than cured mortar, so judging a match wet is how people end up disappointed.

We cut joints to depth: roughly twice the joint width, and deeper where the old mortar stays soft past that point.

We match the joint profile and the tooling on your existing wall, because color alone does not make a repair disappear.

We clean up daily. Mortar droppings, brick chips and dust get cleared at the end of each day, and the masonry and the ground below it are washed down before we leave for good.

We put the workmanship warranty in writing, with the term stated on your estimate. If a joint we pointed fails early we come back and put it right.

How we price and what changes it

Masonry pricing is driven by access more than anything else. A garage wall you can reach off a ladder and a third floor gable behind a power line are the same square footage and nothing like the same job. Scaffold, sidewalk permits and protection over a slate roof all sit in the number before a joint is cut.

The other variable is what is behind the wall. We write scopes with unit prices, so if we open an area and find crushed bearing under a lintel or a void behind the face, you already know what that costs.

Permits, historic districts and honest limits

In the City of St. Louis, the Building Division treats tuckpointing and structural masonry repair as permitted work, and we pull the permit rather than asking you to. If your building sits in a local historic district, the Cultural Resources Office reviews exterior work and the standards can govern the mortar and the joint profile. We check the address before quoting. University City, Webster Groves and Kirkwood run their own permits and preservation review.

We also tell you when a job is not ours. Structural movement needs a structural engineer before any brick goes back. Flue relining is its own trade with its own code requirements. Interior drain tile and sump systems belong to a waterproofing contractor.

Scheduling around the weather

Mortar cures by hydration and that stops near freezing. Standard cold weather practice is to hold off placing mortar below 40 degrees Fahrenheit unless materials are heated and the work is kept above freezing for a day or two afterwards. So we book crowns, small repairs and protected work in cold spells and hold full elevations for spring. In summer the opposite applies: mortar baked by direct sun cures too fast and ends up weak, so we shade and mist the work.