Summer Jobs – Painting masonry

As with last weeks blog post on painting woodwork, painting masonry requires as much, if not a little more, preparation.

Brickwork, render, stonework and blockwork can crumble during the winter as the water gets into tiny fissures and freezes. As water freezes, it expands. The expansion process cracks the masonry a tiny bit more. The crack then lets in a little more water and the process repeats itself all through the winter.

This, in construction physics terms, is called Freeze-Thaw action.

To guard against this, regular summer maintenance is called for and our blog post on repointing brickwork will help here. We also have a project called preparing brickwork for painting and you can get there by clicking on the link.

At the bottom of this page you can find out how to replace a damaged brick, how to clean surplus mortar from bricks and we even have a project on how to clean efflorescence