Masonry contractor in Macon, GA - repairs that fix why old brick fails

A lot of the brick houses here are old enough that they were laid with mortar softer than anything sold off the shelf today, and that matters once the joints wear out. Repoint them with hard modern mortar and the brick takes the stress and the water instead of the joint, so the faces of the bricks start to crack and flake off. We look at what's in your wall, mix a mortar to suit it and take the old joints out by hand where a grinder would chip the edges, which is slower but leaves the brick whole.

If your house or building is zoned H or CBD, it sits in one of Macon-Bibb's Design Review Districts, and work there may need a look from the Design Review Board and a Certificate of Appropriateness before anything starts. We'll help you work through those review steps up front, so the repair plan and the board's review line up.

Macon and Bibb County run as one consolidated government, so wherever your house sits in the county, building permits come from the Macon-Bibb Building and Fire Safety Department. The county won't issue one without a Certificate of Zoning Compliance, so a permitted job clears zoning first and then building, and that order sets how soon we can start. Before you hire anyone, ask for their Georgia residential contractor license and their Macon-Bibb business license, which the county requires of every business working here unless the law exempts it. We're fully licensed and insured, and when your job needs a permit, we handle the application and the inspections. Price and schedule both turn on the size of the job, that permit step and what we find once old work is opened up, and you get your own figure when I write up the scope.

We're based in Macon and work all over Middle Georgia, so the crew that fixes a chimney here is the same one that builds walls in Byron and Warner Robins, a short run down I-75, or repoints a porch in Milledgeville. Once a job is outside Macon-Bibb the permit office changes, and we sort out which one applies before we schedule anything.

Macon's houses run the whole range, and you can see it within a few streets. Close to downtown there's older brick with tall chimneys and porches on piers, then the brick ranches from the middle of the last century, and farther out the newer subdivisions, where brick or stone usually covers the front over a block or slab foundation. Plenty of folks here want something new too, like a brick garden wall, a walk to the street or an outdoor kitchen out back, and we do the same work down in Centerville and Perry.

That mix shapes the job before we start. On an older house the work is slower and gentler because the brick can't be replaced off a pallet, while on a newer one a crack in the veneer, the single layer of brick on the frame, usually sends us looking at the foundation or the flashing behind it.