she's a brick house

MIGHTY MIGHTY.

To recap our first week for you, our construction was supposed to start last Monday. It didn’t though; they were having some issues with getting a dumpster close to the house. So Monday.. Tuesday.. Wednesday.. nothing. Thursday RC went by and saw this:



would you even know this was our house?




it was late and dark, but look.. it's RED!




hello brick, sorry you've been covered for so long!



Can you even handle it?! Just to refresh your memory, this is what it looked like last week:



the monkey wasn't impressed




see ya, polyester!



That grey stuff that is no more is called Formstone. A little Baltimore history lesson for you, all row homes are brick- that pretty red brick that nobody should ever cover or paint but in the 1950s some guy started selling Formstone and marketing it as “no up keep and virtually no maintenance” and compared to the porous brick everyone loved that idea! He quickly became a rich man because up it went… everywhere. You can find it all around the city in multiple colors. I’ve seen shades of grey, blue, combinations of grey and blue, browns, purple and of course the legendary orange and black Harley Davidson house in Canton. The good thing about it, if there is a good thing, is that it just went OVER the pretty brick so if you remove the Formstone and repoint the brick we can all pretend like it never happened. kay? We decided that we wanted to expose the brick again and to qualify for an historic tax credit (more on this later) we had to. Win-win. I read that Formstone was referred to as the “polyester of brick”, I die. So off with the polyester brick!

The next day, they put an acid on the brick to take off the glue from the Formstone.

acid or sunscreen.. it hasn't seen the light of day in a while.

Not sure what the next step is- probably cleaning off the acid/glue and repointing the brick. Repointing? Huh?

Repointing is the process of renewing the pointing (external part of the mortar joints) in masonry construction. Over time, weathering and decay causes voids in the joints between masonry units (usually bricks) allowing the undesirable ingress of water. Water entering through these voids can cause significant damage through freeze/thaw cycles and from salt dissolution and deposition. Repointing is also called pointing, or pointing up, although these terms more properly refer to the finishing step in new construction.
(thanks, Wikipedia)

Regardless.. this was one of those projects that I was most excited for! I do know what you’re thinking, what happened to the red awning?!


she has a new home in back yard.. until the dumpster comes