Repointing a Stone Foundation

hi there i am out here with my stone foundation which sorely needs repointing and it's really common if you have a stone foundation that over time that mortar will start to degrade and i'm going to show you how to do your own maintenance on this type of foundation we're mixing our mortar in a lined wheelbarrow and i've made a little well there in the center we're just pouring the water right in sometimes it's easier as a two-person job so we're going to shake this tarp sort of simulating a cement mixer [Music] do [Music] i've already done all the prep work here and you can see that i have some big holes to fill all the way to small narrow joints i can barely get a finger in to prep this we chipped out all the old mortar and actually did i shop fact it too and brushed it off just to make sure we got as much of the old out as possible before we started repointing with our new mortar for most diy jobs the right tools are everything and i could try to press the mortar into those deep grooves but instead i've created a little something to hopefully make it easier i've grabbed a trash bag and created what looks similar to a cake icing bag i'm going to fill it with mortar and then squeeze it carefully into the deepest grooves that i have over there [Music] before i start packing these joints with fresh mortar i'm going to give everything around a little spray and that will make sure that our fresh mortar adheres to our stones we want it damp but not necessarily dripping i went a little overboard here in some of these places but that'll also take down the dust too and just make a strong bond between the mortar and your stones idea here is to completely pack these joints and get to the point where i just have to tool the outside [Music] all right i took off my gloves again just to point at things not to touch the water but i want to say that at this stage it really doesn't matter what things look like you can see i've got lots of little tool marks and it looks kind of globby and it's just all over the place i haven't even started tooling yet at this point i'm just filling the voids there's nothing super special about the way that i'm packing all of these voids here between the stones but this is where i will have a pretty big snowpack um maybe even most of the winter so as i am doing this i am considering runoff water runoff snowmelt and making sure that my angles allow for any sort of water or moisture to run away from the foundation instead of back down into any sort of cracks or imperfections in the stone [Music] [Music] uh my mortar's been drying for about an hour and i'm gonna come through and kind of fine-tune the look that i want here this is when i can actually use a brush or whatever to take away any sort of really strong tool marks here it's still somewhat fragile but it's definitely not wet it's dry kind of crumbly on the outside and i'm just carefully making some changes here to the way i want my mortar to look once it's dry do [Music] this is the time to start really smoothing those sharp tooled joints that you made maybe your tools were a little bit aggressive in one area but you know imperfections are nice this is these stones are full of character your foundation is full of character might as well embrace that make it look it's interesting so it doesn't have to be perfect we want it functional that's the part we're shooting for i'm just coming back to this several hours later give it a check up on it and i'm really pleased the grout color will dry lighter i don't think i mentioned that before and i'm going to mist it this particular mortar requires a light misting every now and then for about 48 hours [Music] you

Channel: Stacy - Blake Hill House

Views: 4,373

Rating: 4.6078429 out of 5

Keywords: historic house, diyblogger, lime mortar

Id: fwINkg11CDg

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021