Tar on Brick Exterior
Hello! We just had a home inspection on a house which we have an accepted offer. The inspector expressed deep concern with the back exterior wall, that was completely covered with tar. He pointed out the neighboring buildings had various treatments, but he said tar is the worst. He suggested we contact a mason to get a quote to remove the tar and properly point the brick. My question: has anyone had this done, and if so, can you give a ball park on costs? For context, the tar covers 2 floors, and the house is 17′ wide. Thank you!
casadelsol16
in General Discussion 4 years and 1 month ago
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pearlstoh | 4 years and 1 month ago
I have a similar situation on the east wall of my home – it used to be a party wall, but the party was demolished in the 70s after a fire. The 1980 tax photo shows it was painted (maybe with thorocoat), but it looks like tar may have gone up at some point before that and now it’s all peeling away, exposing the brick underneath and small birds appear to be building nests in some of those sections now.
The wall at my place is much larger than your back walI, but I’ve had a few quotes to clean and reseal it :
Quote 1: Install new mesh, 2 coats stucco, 2 coats thorocoat = $25K (not including scaffolding & didn’t mention cleaning or repointing bricks)
Quote 2: hanging scaffolding, cleaning, masonry parged with fresh mortar, bonding agent, mesh, scratch coat + final of stucco, 2 coats of Thorolastic = $35K
Quote 3: hanging scaffolding, cleaning, repointing as needed, 2 coats of Thorocoat = $42K
** I’m leaning towards Quote 2, it seems the most thorough and detailed o f the 3 and I prefer the look of Thorolastic to Thorocoat
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Arkady | 4 years and 1 month ago
I didn’t grow any edibles for a few years after the work but don’t really know about the residue. No, there weren’t pockets of it in the very porous brick which I sealed at the time & there were mainly bluestone pavers underneath the wall.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 1 month ago
i don’t want to sway the op as the people she hires will best know, but if i had to do this again, it would be chemical. all sorts of chemicals break the tar down (inc old fashioned methylene chloride).
arkady, did it leave any residue in the open pores? when ever we use chemicals like this, we have to worry about it landing on the stone and brick and it is troubling for us.
yeah, i realize i am beginning to mix my decades up – 2 decades, 3 decades, what the difference?
Arkady | 4 years and 1 month ago
Doorsbtw – It was more like 1987 I think & we used a toxic mix of chemicals for days. Contractor said he’d’ve done the water method if it weren’t for the drought.
casadelsol16 | 4 years and 1 month ago
Thank you all so much for taking the time to respond – this is very helpful!
hkapstein | 4 years and 1 month ago
I have only done small areas, but I think a mechanical method, chiseling, blasting or grinding, will be the best bet. But is it over some kind of mesh or stucco? Who knows. I’d suggest doing a sample and see how long it takes and if you find the appearance of the bricks acceptable, and then decide what makes sense to do.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 1 month ago
so for those of you who do not like my “gibberish”, please feel free to skip this reply. i have been thinking about this post for the past hour or so as i work.
Unless there is a process i do not know about (i am not sure sand blasting will work on the tar – it may be too soft and sand works best on hard matter; been there, done that – and i am not sure what the neighbors will think about sand blasting in the city) the fastest way for a contractor to remove this will be an angle grinder. this is the problem with an angle grinder in the wrong hands; because it is so fast and aggressive, there is a temptation to use it for the entire job. because of the way we hold angle grinders and move them back and forth over a surface, we tend to tilt them as we switch directions – especially when moving fast. as we tilt them, we can (and many people do) dig into the underlying surface, basically leaving the finished product looking “choppy”. i mention it above, that we can look at a wall in a house where they used an angle grinder to remove the plaster and we know exactly what happen. In my own house, i had to remove some 1920’s plaster reliefs on the walls and knew the risk i was taking so i used an angle grinder to remove the high spots and then switched to a sander, first a belt sander and then a ro sander. even the belt sander is not perfect and today i would use a festool as i can control it better (its made for wood; better balance yet aggressive).
people use grinders with these sort of flap disks on them on wood and screw the wood up all the time. these old bricks are not much harder than a very hard wood and in the wrong hands, these machines are a disaster.
fully experienced and professional companies who do this for a living and nothing else, will have ways to address the issue i just mentioned. the less experienced firms who charge less money will be under more pressure to move fast and that is where the issues will arise.
for your sake, i hope they have another way to remove this stuff. it is really bad. i think the week i had to do that work was the lowest point in my working life.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 1 month ago
arkady, my one time experience does not make me an expert, but my thought is, that tar is so tenacious that it would grab the pores in the brick and pointing and not let go. the water drip method, I had a quote from Grenadier to do that on a sandstone building once. it seems more suited for washing loose environmental soiling from sandstone. i may be wrong, but i cannot imagine it breaking the tar bond.
that drought you are referencing – that was 1999 me thinks. i recall where i was working at the time and it had impacted our operations. we were getting very nervous. remember how it ended, one week of rain and all was better.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 1 month ago
when i was looking for a real job after college, i took a by the day labor job and the guy had two of us remove hard tar from exactly the same situation. it was the worst task or job I ever had in my life (i went in a deli for lunch and people avoided me like i had the plague). we used a lot of abrasive disks – and i was being paid to work, not think – so i cannot even recall the grits we were using – but they were heavy and the tar clogged the paper often.
i just saw your 2 floor/17′ – that is like the size of my house and smaller than what we were doing. i would say two guys can have that done in three days, under a week (removing the tar; it depends on how thick it is, the stuff we were doing with was thick, multiple passes). if people use abrasive disks on this, their is a chance that they will leave the wall uneven as the disks do not take material down like a flat sander (you will see it inside brownstone houses where someone used a wheel to remove plaster vs a sander; the wheel is faster but the sander neater) (and keep in mind, there are different classes of tradesmen doing this, some may not warn of the risks; a professional mason will be the better choice).
i should assume you will find people who have done this and will know what to do. if this was me again (and i am not putting my name forth), i would try to find a way to chemically remove at least the outer most layer of tar, bearing in mind that a wet chemical can force watery tar into crevices. and then either sand blast or belt sand. of course, if you have a pro, defer to them.
that is the tar removing part. there are two classes of pointers out there. our mortar points on this house were sort of “struck” and while they looked bad they were tight and not leaking. so we had a guy come in and power wash to remove loose stuff and go over the old pointing with new mortar which filled the joints out – and he had done all the neighbors houses and they were happy and we have no issues (its held for 15 years in our case, the neighbors, closer to 20). the cost for this on the front of a house only 2′ wider than yours was $2600 in 2006. if i could find the name of the guy (i think the firm was G&S) i would post it here. but there is never any guarantee that kind of pointing job will hold.
now, i worked in commercial and in commercial, things are done different. When we decided that joints needed repointing, we would be hiring someone to clean them out using a diamond wheel to a proper depth to take the new mortar so it holds (what we did on our houses here is risky; it can fall out). that will easily cost four times the 2500 i paid (putting you in urbandad’s price range). (i did get a quote in 1999 for a repointing of a 4 story double wide in manhattan, with scoffold, proper and professional masons; 50k, i forget if they were union masons)
keep in mind when you talk to “masons”. just as with the painters out there, there are true masons who will take your first born for a down payment on the job and then there are the guys like the ones i used. two entirely different skillsets and two entirely different approaches to their trade. you will get what you pay for and you can decide how happy you are in about ten or twenty years (we are still happy 15 yrs later).
Arkady | 4 years and 1 month ago
I had that & had it removed but it was over 30 years ago so what I paid isn’t relevant. We were in a drought at the time so it was painstaking & toxic work. I think today they’d do a slow process of dripping water to get it off.
hkapstein | 4 years and 1 month ago
It’s hard to say and depends on a lot of factors, like how you will reach the tar and how you will take it out of the house, and what is under it, but I’d guess you could be looking at 10-20k.