I know you guys look at these exterior pics and think … “what’s going on with the brick porch?”. I cringe a little on the inside when I would put up in the driveway. The bricks were sheer nonsense I will admit. It seem like it was in desperate need of tuck pointing years ago. Someone decided that they would take matters into their own “able” hands and pipe cement (not Mortar) all over the place.
I could hear now them saying, “No…No, we don’t need to grind out any thing… Don’t worry the gray cement with blend just fine with the red mortar”.
I honestly thought the only help would be to tear it down and start over… about a $12,000 job. So when I had the two rear corners of the house rebuilt I asked the brick mason what he thought… he agreed. It would need to be tore down, but if I wasn’t ready to make that leap I could tuck point the hell out of it, color match the mortar and rebuild a few corners. For a couple thousand dollars it would at least give me 5-10 more years to accumulate a real budget for it. I made the deal and it was a huge improvement.
It went from this nonsense … 
To this …. 
Is it perfect? No… but its quite the improvement.
Oh and it was not a painless process either, this guy was so friggin messy (not that it wasn’t a messy job), it was dust everywhere from the guy grinding out the joints of the crappy job before. He also murdered my hydrangeas again… alas the deed is done and she is now a “Brickhouse”. LOL!
