Chimney Repointing in Hamilton, NJ
Hamilton Chimney Repair repoints chimneys in Hamilton and throughout Mercer County: receding joints, sandy mortar you can rake out with a key, and the open beds that let water into the stack in the first place.
Repointing is not a coat of mortar over the old joint. The failed material comes out to roughly three quarters of an inch, the joint is cleaned and dampened, and new mortar is packed in lifts and tooled to match the profile that is already on the wall.
Reading the joints on your own chimney
Mortar you can scratch out with a house key
Sound mortar resists a key. If it comes away as sand, the binder is gone and the joint is only holding a shape, not the wall.
Joints set back from the brick face
A quarter inch of recession is a shelf that holds water against the brick. That is where freeze-thaw damage starts and where spalling follows.
Hard grey mortar on soft old brick
A previous repair in Type S or straight Portland is harder than the units around it. The brick faces break instead of the joint, which is the opposite of how a masonry wall is meant to fail.
How we repoint a stack in Hamilton
- Test the existing mortar and match a mix by hardness, colour, and sand, not by bag name.
- Grind and chisel the failed joints out to depth without cutting the brick arrises.
- Flush the dust out and pre-dampen so the new mortar cures instead of drying.
- Pack the joints in lifts, then tool them to the original profile: concave, weathered, or struck.
- Brush down the faces and cover the work while it cures.
Why Type N, and when lime instead
Type N mortar is the default on chimneys because it is softer than the brick and lets the joint take the movement. On genuinely old, soft units we mix a lime-rich mortar instead. The one thing we will not do is point a nineteenth-century stack in Type S because it sets faster. That trade is paid for later in broken brick faces.
What repointing costs in Hamilton
Repointing is priced by the square footage of joint that actually needs cutting, the height above the roofline, and access. Spot pointing two faces above the shingles is a different scope to taking a full stack back to sound mortar. We measure it, mark up a photograph with what we would cut, and price from that.
Repointing across the area
Hamilton, Trenton, Princeton, Ewing, Lawrence Township, Robbinsville, Bordentown, Hightstown, East Windsor, Allentown, Pennington, Hopewell, Yardley, Levittown.