Repointing and Tuckpointing in Syracuse and Onondaga County

In everyday use around here they are the same job, and most homeowners say tuckpointing. In the specification literature repointing is the term for cutting failed mortar out of the joints and refilling them, which is what almost every residential job actually is. Historically tuckpointing described a decorative technique where a joint was filled and a thin contrasting line set into it. If a contractor uses the two words interchangeably, that is normal and not a warning sign. What matters is not which word is on the quote. It is whether the quote says which mortar is going into your wall.

The screwdriver test people describe online is genuinely diagnostic, so start there. Run a key or a nail along a joint: if it powders and you can scrape material out to any depth, that joint has failed. Then look for missing sections, joints that sound hollow when tapped, brick you can rock by hand, and damp patches inside on the same wall. Preservation Brief 2 names disintegrating mortar, cracked joints, loose bricks or stones, damp walls and damaged plasterwork as the usual signs that lead to repointing. Its next sentence is the one worth remembering: it is an error to assume repointing alone will solve a problem that came from somewhere else, so the root cause gets dealt with first.

The letters are ASTM mortar types, and they are recipes rather than laboratory results, which means a mason can commit to one in writing on the day of the quote. In decreasing strength they run Type M at 2,500 psi, Type S at 1,800, Type N at 750 and Type O at 350. The Brick Industry Association recommends Type N for normal use including most veneer, and on a postwar house that is usually right. Type S is more than five times the strength of Type O, so a Type S specification on soft pre 1940 brick is the conversation to have before work starts rather than after. More lime means a softer, more permeable joint, and lime is the ingredient that gets left out. Preservation Brief 2 also warns off the preblended masonry cement bags sold at hardware stores: they are not required to contain hydrated lime and generally do not, so they produce high strength mortars that can damage older masonry. Ask whether the mortar is being mixed from cement, lime and sand on site or poured out of a bag. It is the cheapest question you can ask and the most revealing.

Because you are buying hours at a height, not a bag of mortar. Labor runs roughly 80 to 90 percent of a repointing job and the material is 10 to 20 percent, so the mix is not where the money goes. What moves it is access, how much of the wall is being cut out, and whether the work is above about ten feet, where OSHA requires fall protection and a scaffold has to be erected and inspected before the first joint is opened. Scattered spot work also costs more per foot than a continuous run, which is why a mason would rather do a whole elevation. If you want two quotes to be comparable, ask each of them the same three things: which mortar type, what joint depth, and how the work is accessed.

It changes the law that applies to the job. EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule covers paid work that disturbs painted surfaces in homes built before 1978, and EPA administers the program directly in New York rather than the state running its own. The exemption for minor repair stops at 20 square feet of exterior painted surface, and work in the same 30 days counts as one job, so a genuine repointing run goes past it. Separately, 40 CFR 745.85 prohibits grinding, sanding, power planing, needle guns and abrasive blasting on painted surfaces during covered work unless the machine has a shroud or containment and a HEPA vacuum collecting dust at the point it is generated, operated so that no visible dust escapes. Since grinding is how joints get cut out, the whole method sits under that rule. In the City of Syracuse, where 85.5 percent of housing predates 1980, this is the normal case rather than a rare one. Ask to see the firm's EPA lead safe firm certification, and look for the shroud and the vacuum before the first cut. Visible dust drifting across the yard is the test the regulation itself is written around.

It is a wall temperature question rather than a calendar question. The federal guidance asks for wall temperatures between 40 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and Syracuse's normal daily minimum stays below 40 degrees from October through April, so a shaded elevation can be out of range while the forecast looks fine. The reason not to push it is what happens next. In a normal year here the daily low reaches freezing on 129.5 days but the daily high stays below freezing on only 45.7, so on roughly 84 days the temperature crosses in both directions rather than sitting frozen. March alone brings 17.8 of those crossings, more than any other month, and it brings them while the snow of December and January is melting into the joints. An open joint left in October gets worked about eighty times before spring, and a joint filled too cold will not survive them either. So the honest answer late in the season is a spring start, with the worst of the wall covered in the meantime.