Before and After

The Hillsdale County Historical Society keeps a museum house on county fairgrounds, and this 19th-century stone foundation collapse is a testimonial to the power of misdirected water—the cause of most masonry problems. The house was lacking eaves troughs for however many decades, and water from two roofs puddled outside this wall. A very cold winter to follow a very wet fall pulled this trick, "the last straw."
Since I work alone, it was necessary to split some rocks that were too heavy for me to lift. Bricks were used for much of the thick wall's infill. An eavestrough has since been installed.
The human denizens of this sanctuary could hardly wait to be rid of this eyesore, at the entrance to their private, piney woods. 
Members of a home association nestled into spruce and pine woods requested this fieldstone structure. Stone slabs for caps were not wanted, just a slightly rounded top of the rough building material. The structure is seven feet long, around 48 inches high. 

The sign itself was engraved by James Littley, Jarsa & Company, of Hillsdale, Mich. This sandstone from India is extremely dense, and I dared not attempt to drill mounting holes through it. It is mounted with clips attached to backing brick instead. The sign's back was slathered with clear silicone, its bottom rests on fieldstones, and all sides were mortared in. 
This 19th-century physician’s house and clinic once had a double door for admission of patients. The door’s arch remnants are seen here. It’s not known why the double door opening was bricked in, and a single door with a steel lintel installed in its place.
After removing the lintel, I also had to remove more bricks than required for a new arch, the form of which is here in place. The double-door infill bricks were not stack-bonded to the originals, and the whitish remnant arch joints were hairline cracked. I didn’t care to have a hundred pounds of bricks falling down on me. Ample arch form support was another worry, so a couple of the homeowners’ 2x4s were scrounged up to brace the form. 
A segmental double arch was built to the same height of the original, semi-circular arches; a flat arch over the door; and the tympanum—a fancy name for the infill. 
The double-door outlines have begun to lighten up and disappear. The repairs to the left of the door’s bottom half are fresh here, still dark. The bricks just above the foundation stones were repaired after this picture was taken. A house-side porch will be extended around the corner, and this entrance provided some steps for the first time since … who knows how long. 

The metal “flowers” to the right were each visited by a hummingbird one day.
This dropped, slopped-over flat arch endured a number of attempted fixes that were to no avail. The idiot who ran the drainage pipe through an arch end-brick might have done the most damage
After removing the bricks and cleaning them, I dry-laid the first course to check on its spacing.
It is good to correct another mess, but I sure wish DIY-ers wouldn’t make such messes in the first place.
In the same 1874 house, I opened up one of the chimneys, which was badly stained and cracked down the center. The chimney was jam-packed with creosote, and the cracking was surely due to chimney fires. There was no liner. The chimney on this and the opposite side consisted of only one wall of brick. Connected to it were pipes from four, maybe even five coal- and wood-burning stoves.
This chimney is out of commission now. Side-venting propane furnaces have been installed in the big house, one in the basement, one in the attic. The pipe seen here is one of these new runs. 

Fresh mud for the new, old bricks hasn’t lightened up yet, and there are still a lot of opened joints on either side of it to chisel out and refill. Fun’s fun ...
A restaurant employee set a burning cigarette on the sill of what was here a window, and caused a fire. I like the brick under the scaffold crossbraces, doing a dramatic balancing act.
This was a humble job of bricking the opening and cleaning up a few of the prior repair messes. New bricks were toothed into original ones and around 20 wall ties were installed. The old ties were simply long nails that had rusted. I could bend them out of the way with two fingers. 
A more interesting sight is what remains of this old firehouse across the street. I love this old building and would like to disassemble it and rebuild it on our land. I don’t think this will happen. 
The west wall of this 1860 stone house’s wing was pretty messed up with inappropriate repointing jobs through the years. The replacement mud was too hard and didn’t allow for wind-blown water evaporation through the joints. Behind the Portland cement-rich “fixes” were deep gaps where original mortar had been reduced to sand. 
There’s not much to be seen here in the way of repairs, but the stones are more clearly visible with slopped-on mortar mostly removed from their faces. More importantly, the gaping holes behind them have been tamp-pointed. 
The old stovepipe through the wall had to be cut out. Many stones were removed and many others took their places.
The south wall (where the ladder is set in the photograph below) was the worst of the work. This wall appeared as though it had collapsed once upon a time and been rebuilt by someone with no aesthetic sense, who was also intoxicated. 
The customer is changing the colors of the window trim and siding. I cut and caulked wood-expansion joints at the sides of the windows. The white caulking seen here will turn clear and disappear. 
Here is a not-too-picturesque chimney—with cracked blocks covered in rust from an old steel cap, slathered with mortar and caulk, and in so much movement that the flashing was ripped up from the roof. The whole thing could have been pushed to the ground with one hard heave. Somebody once made the mistake of leaning a ladder against it for cleaning, and had a good, wobbly scare.
I tore everything down to the roofline and determined that what lay below was sound. The replacement blocks of concrete I used for the rebuilding were the “stone-faced” variety. These rough faces jut out a half-inch from the smooth block ends, so the corners appear to be out of plumb, which they’re not. A rustic look. 

Installed new aluminum flashing, and would’ve liked to install some new appliance venting to replace the rusty and crooked pipe to the left. 
This flower/planter box was built only 30-odd years ago, but the cap brick joints were deeply raked instead of being flush-cut for the best shedding of water, and there were no weep holes. Masonry structures open to the weather need these drainage openings. 
Around 50 bricks on this box were too far gone for repair and were replaced. 
I couldn’t stand the look of nine opened head (vertical) joints, especially at different levels on this sloped work, and so ran cotton clotheslines through them from the outside to the inside of the box, and mortared the lines in. You can see the cord ends dangling over the walk, in fresh mud that hasn’t lightened yet. The cords will be burned off either just on the ends, or through the wall, leaving just a small drain hole.

The figurine in the background made me think a couple of times that I was being visited by some homeless waif. 
The task here was to build fieldstone encasements around five rectangular posts to a height of just under three feet, and to give the posts a taper.
The pillar caps are of Pennsylvania bluestone, purported to be around 360 million years old. The unstained wood pieces at the top of the tapers are nailers for trim. Trim will also be installed on their bases. 

Boiled linseed oil was put to the bluestone, to help protect it and bring out its color. The final stain color will be darker, browner. My customer and newest friend is seen here to the left, inspecting his own pictures just taken of the works. 
There’s no sense in not repairing bricks instead of replacing them, when their faces are spalled but the bricks are mostly intact. The original mortar on this chimney was extremely hard, so windblown rain took the evaporative path of least resistance, through the bricks’ faces instead of through the joints. Freeze/thaw cycles did this damage.
The chimney was fully repointed after the bricks were repaired with tinted mortar. Type O mortar, twice as rich in mason’s lime than Portland cement, was used for both procedures.
These porch slab walls suffered a similar fate, due to their original joints that were raked back a half-inch (probably the worst kind of joint there is for shedding water), opened sill joints and poor drainage.
Replacing all these damaged bricks would have cost $4,000 or so. My repairs cost $1,850, and I was confident enough to guarantee them for the remainder of my days.

The customer has placed a mound of infill dirt beneath the new drain spout, to direct water well away from the wall. 
This 1863 schoolhouse, which recently received an addition, had two collapsed corners, both of which have been repaired.

These cut-stone step sidewalls are at an Amish home. The beaded mortar joints seemed ostentatious for an Amish place, but on inquiry I learned that the house had not been built by the owner's grandfather, merely purchased by him.
Convex mortar joints are slow in the making, and I believe they detract from the look of the stone itself. Excess mud must be cut away toward the stone rather than away from it, so stone edges will pick up some mortar stains. Deference must be made to the taste of original builders, though, so as not to invite their ghosts' displeasure.
A good portion of my first customer of 2015's house foundation looked like this. I convinced him to expose the stones, however badly they were laid. They had been covered with gray paint. We both endeavored to remove the paint, I mainly with a cup grinder.
The stones were set too far apart to receive standard new joints, in which case more mortar than rocks would be showing. I had to visually draw the stones closer together, and decided that roped joints were the way to do it. The grooves I cut between the rocks above were keys for new roped joints.
The newly exposed foundation wound up looking like so:
This ornamental buttress on a house in Detroit took a hit from a car or truck, and on site initially there was no telling which stone should go where. So I measured all the stones' faces in inches, made centimeters of the inches at home (i.e., 12 inches=12 centimeters), scissored out the scaled-down drawings of the stones and puzzle-pieced them together.
Brick and stone puzzle solved.
This approach to a very nice old house in Detroit's Rosedale Park was less than inviting, and my customer wanted a full-sized front porch, not just a landing slab. Jackhammer- and excavation machine-rental time.
Low overnight temperatures during construction made necessary a tent of plastic and a ceramic disc heater (center). This tiny thing was surprisingly quite capable of keeping the 20-some-foot-long works at 40+ degrees. The customer's electric bill did spike for this heat; fortunately she was good-humored about it.
After the tying of brick to inner block, the porch walls were 12 inches thick. The weather warmed as if on cue for the pouring of the cap and the casting on the ground of concrete steps. The new concrete sports impressions of the customer's hands, those of her two children (grown now), the paw prints of their now deceased dogs and cat, and one hand print of my own. A family friend who used to live in Rosedale Park helped me position the steps. This project was otherwise a solitary endeavor.
In Bloomfield Hills you can't have a whole-house generator without concealing it from public view, and muffling its noise as much as reasonably possible. For her new generator, my customer requested a hiding set-up that would complement the reclaimed brick of her house.

The diesel engine turned on automatically for periodic testing. I must have jumped about 10 feet the first time, thinking a wayward semi was headed straight for me.
The wall cavities were given rigid foam for some small degree of sound insulation, and boxed with plywood and cedar. The facing sides were given metal lath, stucco, then thin brick (real brick, but of only 1/2-inch thickness). To counter any structural movement or generator vibration, a "soft" lime mortar was used.
This sandstone sphere is one of a pair along Grand River Avenue in Detroit, at a neighborhood street entrance. It was showing a number of cracks and its pedestal had taken automobile whacks on a couple of sides.
Sphere During Construction
The stone and pedestal cap were repaired, the bricks replaced. I attached a red reflector to the finished works for good measure.
In removing the original, rotten porch step bricks, I discovered they'd had no suitable foundation. Unanticipated, free-of-charge underground work then became a part of this job. So it goes sometimes.
I didn't much care for the customers' color choice for new bricks, but they were pleased.