Lightening Dark Off Color Brick on a Bloomfield Home

What was wrong

Nothing had failed and nothing was dirty. Some of the units had simply come out darker than the rest, and they were scattered across the house rather than gathered in one place. The file says it in seven words: off colored dark brick throughout the house.

It was hired by the brick manufacturer, not the family and not the mason. A brick company looked at a finished house it had supplied, and paid to bring the color together instead of pulling the wall down.

What was done

Mineral stain, brushed on by hand, unit by unit, and only on the units that needed it. The line in the file is short: we had to lighten a lot of the dark brick. The blotches came up to meet the brick around them, which is why the wall still reads as brick and not as one flat color.

What twenty-two years prove

Same wall, same corner, same courses, and no dark unit standing out of it. On the certification scale that is Platinum, the top rung, which covers twenty years and over. The note on the form is one sentence: 22 years later, this still looks great. As of 2026 the work is twenty-nine years old, and the 2019 certification is the most recent record on it.

The signed file

Every certified job gets the same form, signed on the day someone goes back to the building. This is the one for case 143, transcribed beside the scan so it can be read on a phone and by a search engine.