Ridely Park, PA Job
Job Description:
Owners of an 1890 Queen Anne located in Ridley Park, PA were looking to spruce up their home. In its current condition the building was showing years of misguided repairs and maintenance. There were sections brick where years of paint splatter and excessive caulking needed to be removed. Metal fasteners that were left in the building needed to be removed, and there were sections of mortar that were missing or failing and needed to be removed and replaced. There was also sections of wall that had been repointed using Portland cement based mortar. This is a practice that is very harmful to historic structures. Portland cement based mortars are not water vapor permeable, and can trap moisture inside the walls. This moisture needs a way to pass back and forth through the walls, which is done traditionally through the mortar joints. The mortar joints of most homes built before the 1920s used a lime based mortar. These types of mortar joints allowed for water vapor to easily pass through the joints, helping to preserve the building material it surrounded. When lime based mortars are replaced with Portland cement based mortars that path for the moisture to pass through the joints is blocked, forcing the moisture to find another route through the wall. This shows up in two ways. On the exterior it shows up in the failing of brick or stone building material, where parts or all of the face of the material begins to fall off due to the moisture causing it to fail. The second place it shows up is in the interior, where walls that are plastered directly over the exterior building material start to flake off, because the moisture in the walls chooses to move inside rather than outside, causing the plaster to flake and fall off the wall. To bring this home back to its original glory a careful plan was developed that preserved as much of the original historic fabric as possible. The walls were gently cleaned using paint strippers to remove the excessive paint and caulking. Other cleaners were used to remove biological growth and atmospheric pollutants. Areas of failing or missing mortar joints were removed and cleaned up and made ready for new material. Areas of Portland cement based patching from previous repairs were removed and prepped for repointing. All of the prepped areas were then pointed using ® Mortar custom mixed to match the existing surrounding mortar joints. This lime based mortar is an in kind repair, allowing the mortar joints to perform as they were originally intended when the house was built. Many unwanted metal fasteners that were left in the walls were removed and patched using the same matching mortar. With its walls now clean and missing mortar joints repaired this simple Queen Anne once again exuded its original charm. | View Next Job Back to Topics |
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Thanks Again.
Mimi Jackson
President