Visited a historic church in Charleston last month and it flipped my opinion on restoration work.

I walked into St. Michael's Episcopal Church just to see the architecture, but I ended up staring at a 200 year old brick wall for 20 minutes. The mortar was so perfectly matched to the original that you couldn't tell which parts had been repointed. The guy working on it told me they spent 6 months just testing different sand and lime mixes before touching anything. Has anyone else had to do that kind of deep research before starting a project?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_morgan1mo agoMost Upvoted

6 months just for testing sand and lime? That's insane. I would have lost my mind by week two on a sample batch.

joelwells1mo agoMost Upvoted

It's insane" is actually pretty accurate if you've never done serious restoration work. You mentioned a sample batch, but that's not really how it works with heritage lime. You're not mixing up a test batch in a bucket and calling it done. You're sourcing sand from specific riverbeds or quarries, then putting together maybe ten or twelve different ratios of sand to lime, and then letting those cure for weeks just to see how they shrink and crack. Then you have to do color matching under different lighting conditions and weather exposure. Six months goes by fast when you're waiting on nature to do its thing, and rushing it means you end up with that peachy tint some poor soul will have to fix later.

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the_oscar1mo ago

Oh man, six months sounds about right if you want it done right. I once spent three months trying to match the damn mortar on a 1920s bungalow and I still ended up with this weird peachy tint that screams "I gave up." The thing is, you think you can just eyeball it and grab some off-the-shelf mix, but then you look at the original and realize it was made with crushed oyster shells and river sand from a specific bend in the creek. My biggest fear is that in 50 years someone's gonna look at my work and think "what was this guy thinking?