A Repair Patch Colored Into a Dark Brown Brick Wall

The problem

Every masonry repair ends at the same place. The structural work is finished, the new units are laid correctly, and the wall now has a bright rectangle in it. Replacement brick is rarely the same color as brick that has been on a building for years, and when it is close, the mortar and the weathering give it away anyway.

This is the job that arrives with a deadline attached. A builder or a homeowner is looking at a finished repair that reads as a patch from the street, and the options are to leave it, to tear out sound masonry and try again with different brick, or to change the color of what is already there.

What we did

Custom colors, mixed on site against the existing wall, and stained onto the new brick one unit at a time. Brick is not one flat color: a wall has range across it, and a patch that is a single perfect average still reads as a patch. The stain goes on unit by unit so the new area picks up the same variation as the brick around it.

The stain absorbs rather than coats, so the repaired area keeps the texture and the light of the rest of the wall. A coating would have solved the color and created a new problem: a film across part of a breathing wall, visible in raking light and guaranteed to fail on its own schedule.

The result

The outline is gone. The second photograph is the same wall from the same angle, and the patch cannot be picked out of it, which is the only acceptable outcome on this kind of work. Same approach applies to additions that miss the original brick, to color corrections when a delivery does not match the sample, and to the repairs that stop a job closing out.

This work runs through builders and contractors most often, the colors are on the color page, and everything we do is covered by the lifetime warranty.