Catching You Up on the Facade
If you’ve been with me for a while, you might recall that I wrote a mini-dissertation on my plans to restore the facade in Summer 2016. Here it is, if you want to read these old posts again:
- Existing Conditions
- A Cornice Vocabulary Primer
- How not to restore historic masonry
- In With Old Windows?
But I’ll give you a tl;dr version in this update.
I wanted to find a house that was as intact as possible. This one had a lot of surviving character, but most of it was badly degraded after decades of bad remodeling and neglect. The front is mostly there and restorable, with a few caveats.
The original masonry is all still there. The house is built with a high grade of old fashioned brick, laid with thin mortar joints, only about 1/8″ wide. The lintels, foundation and window sills are marble. The lintels have a pretty scalloped design carved into them.
But… there is good and bad news with its condition. It’s all covered with peeling paint. The mortar joints are picked out in glaring white when the original mortar was, I believe, red. On the bright side, the house next door to me is in worse condition. It might look good at first glance, but look closer and you’ll see a fine worm hole texture in the brick. That means that someone blasted the durable outer layer off with overzealous power washing. And the wide mortar joints? They’re false, troweled onto the surface of the bricks to make rare and special Victorian brickwork look like something commonplace you’d find in the postwar suburbs.
There’s a bit of water damage near the front door. I believe that there was a slow leak in the radiator pipes for a really long time that caused this. Now the radiator pipes are new. Although I can’t stand the awnings, I kept them in place to protect this from further deterioration.
Aluminum siding installed sideways and sloping out is ugly as sin, but it was a selling point. More attractive installations following the shape of the wood underneath would require removing some of it.
This house is identical to mine. I won’t know how much work my cornice needs till the aluminum comes down.
It was a big selling point that the original window openings were not crudely and irreversibly altered. The alterations you can see on the four houses below are all common in South Philly; only the house behind the tree is restorable.
So the plan seemed obvious. All the aluminum has to go. The awnings have to go. The paint has to go, both from the surviving original wood and from the masonry. Some areas need to be repointed, and the water damaged brick needs something to stabilize it against decaying further.
Then I got a surprise. About a year and a half ago I tried stripping the lower parts of the brick and marble. These are peeling the worst, they’re the most visible, and they seemed like the easiest parts for me to try myself. I discovered not 1 but 3 conditions. Really thick peeling paint on the marble that I think I can get off pretty easily, and some kind of weird bituminous coating on the lowest few feet of the brick. Bituminous means it’s made from tar. As in, someone might have painted MY brick with !@#!@#%!@#$% driveway sealer! This makes no sense, but when I tried to strip it, the bitumen got gooey, almost like thick chocolate cake batter. You can see where the brick changes right by my forehead. Above that line, most of the paint wouldn’t budge.
I got about this far that day before it got dark and I packed up. After that it was too cold for me to be comfortable continuing to wet my brick, so it’s been like this ever since. Better at least?
This leaves the project with a big question mark. Is the brick restorable? Without harsh methods that will damage it? Without a crew of 4 skilled masons working for 2 weeks straight and sticking me with a debt bigger than my car loan? Or will I have to, shudder, paint it again?
9 Responses
What a lot of work. Good luck! I can just imagine some previous owner being counseled by a buddy, “just put driveway sealer on it–it works great!”
As for awnings, if that side of the house gets a lot of sun in summer, why not use retractable awnings? They allow for indirect light when it’s hot, and can be out of the way off-season. I guess they aren’t historically accurate. I have a gigantic (5’x6′) east window that heats up the house in summer. A shade on the inside helps but makes the room gloomy. I’d like a retractable awning to keep all that sun in winter and filter it in summer. But it’s just too windy here, and it would be torn off.
The front faces west so this is a concern. I was jist going to handle it with low e glass since I need new windows anyway
For all we know there might have been some kind of bituminous paint made for masonry. Still a bad idea.
Other thing I don’t like about retractible awnings, besides costing more than low e glass, is I really, REALLY like my marble lintels
Congrats on the new website. I really hope you don’t have to paint again. The absurdity of man is truly stunning at times. Driveway sealer?!
It may not actually ve driveway sealer but it definitely seems like bitumen
Hooray welcome to the dark side 😀
Looking great so far! And I look fwd to seeing the magic you will work on the front of your house!
Congrats again on moving to the new website.
I read the TLDR posts (cause that is how I roll) and appreciate your efforts to get things right. The cornices hidden behind vertically installed aluminum siding is truly a Philly thing (along with the hideous awnings). I’m sure that most of them are intact behind the aluminum shield. Hopefully, it will become a trend to restore them. Our house is one of only a handful on our block which have vintage cornices.
Sorry to hear your brick is in such condition. It never ceases to amaze me how people do shoddy work without any consideration to the future or reflection on the past. I have read that Peel-away is very effective at removing paint from brick without damaging the surface. It is tedious work, but doable with only a 14″ facade.
Vinyl windows are a scourge… I too will be looking to replace our vinyl windows with historically correct single pane wood two over two sashes, but that is a few years off.
I’m friendly with a historic preservation carpenter. He works mostly with 18th Century houses in the western suburbs but lives in Brewerytown. If your original counterweight cavities are intact but need extensive repairs he might be your guy. He also has good ideas about interior storms. I haven’t figured out for sure what I’m doing with the windows but may abandon the truly period correct idea in favor of a good-enough-for-this-house modern wood window.
Everything else… I’m still making sense of. I might be able to start stripping brick in a month. Might.
Keep in mind that many old brick houses (at least those built of softer brick) were painted when new. So, if you do end up painting the brick rather than cleaning it to ideal perfection, you can still have a period finish. There were painters in the 19th century who specialized in “striping” – the painting of mortar joints to pick them out after a brick house was painted. I’ve never cared for the look myself, but it is an authentic period finish. You could always clean the marble and paint the brick as a compromise (omitting the striping this time!). However you proceed, it will look better than it does now!