Re-pointing an Interior Brick Wall

This is a brick wall that you will see go through a few stages.  I’m sparing you the incredibly messy process of taking the mortar out from between the bricks down to a depth of a inch or so.  The interior mortar in these walls was very sandy and prone to crumbling.  Heavy coats of polyurethane probably could have bound the mortar together tight, but that was by no means the desired look here in this room.  A few holes had to be repaired in this wall, and the flu area closed up.  Completely re-pointing these bricks in order to obtain a nice, mostly flat look was the way to go.  Once the new mortar was in, it was stronger than the brick itself for the grinding down process.  The Water seal at the end brought out the colors in the brick with out making them shiny (which would have wrecked the effect of the accent lights we designed into the ceiling to highlight this lovely wall and what ever ended up being displayed upon it.

Here is the wall before the mortar was removed from between the joints.

The lower part of the wall has been re-mortared, the upper section is still dug out.

Off to the left of this picture, the wall is still looking pretty rough.

Here I am in the process of filling the mortar back into the wall. The flue has been closed off with metal and mortar.

Here is a larger area that has been re-pointed. This section will still be scrubbed with water and have the surface lightly ground down to remove excess mortar, and leave a nice clean brickface.

At this point the brick wall has a light coat of Thompson’s Water Seal. We wanted a mostly flat finish to the bricks in this instance.

One of many brick walls I have refurbished over the last decade in NYC.

The same brick wall, a few years down the line.