The season and the approaching cold weather begin to dictate the various tasks at hand. One of them is the masonry repair work around the 1st floor windows.

Almost all the 1st floor windows have window guards. These have been sitting there for a long time with no maintenance and have slowly begun to corrode.

That includes the anchors that are let into the first wythe of the masonry wall. When metal starts to corrode, it begins to expand with an amazing force, pushing some of the surrounding brick work out.

We decided to remove the guards and restore them like we did with the basement windows.

To save time, I called in our mason, who was happy to stop by and take care of the repairs.

He cut and removed the damage brick, removed the guards, which I stowed away in the basement for the time being, and patched the holes with salvaged common brick. As with all masonry work on our old building, I was careful to make sure that we use the right lime based mortar.

This took care of most of the windows, except two, which are a little more involved. More on those in the next posts.