Masonry contractor in Bryan, TX - repairs that blend into older brick

Most of the brick cracks I'm called to look at in Bryan start below the wall. Plenty of ground around here is clay that swells when it's wet and shrinks back in a long dry summer, and when the house moves with it, brick usually cracks in a stair-step line along the mortar joints, sometimes with a door or window nearby that starts to stick. Filling those cracks without asking why just means filling them again next year, so I read the pattern first, and if the foundation is what's moving, I'd rather tell you than patch over it.

Newer Bryan houses are mostly brick veneer, a single layer of brick tied to the frame with small gaps along the bottom called weep holes that let water out. We find them packed with mulch, soil or old mortar more often than you'd think, and then water sits behind the brick, so we clear them out when we're working on that wall.

Building permits in Bryan come from the city's Development Services department, and contractors have to be registered with the city to apply for one, so it's fair to ask anyone you're thinking of hiring whether they're registered this year. Before we start, we find out what Bryan asks for on your job. When a permit is ours to pull, we pull it and set up the inspections, and if you'd rather pull it yourself on your own home, I'll tell you what the city will want to see. The price moves with how much of the wall is really failing, how hard your brick and mortar are to match, how high we have to work and whether something underneath is causing the damage. The schedule turns on the city side, on finding matching brick, and on the weather, because fresh mortar doesn't set up right in a downpour or a scorching afternoon. Your written estimate spells all of that out for your house.

Streets are their own office here. If a driveway or walkway job would cut into the street, that goes through the city's Engineering Services, which issues street-cut permits and has the information on TxDOT permits when work reaches state right-of-way. We're based in College Station right next door, and we also work in Navasota and the other cities around it.

Bryan runs right up against College Station, where we're based, but the houses change once you cross over. Near downtown and in the older neighborhoods you see a lot of brick that's been standing a long time, plenty of it patched over the years by different hands. Further out, the newer subdivisions are mostly brick veneer on frame houses, with yards graded to move water off the lot. In between there are rental houses, family homes on bigger lots and some small brick commercial buildings mixed in.

That mix is why I don't walk onto a Bryan job with the answer already picked. An older house usually needs patient joint work and careful matching, and a newer one more often needs a hard look at the ground and the drainage around it.