Stone Repair in the Seattle Area, WA.

Natural stone is harder and far less absorbent than brick, so it almost never spalls. What fails on a stone wall or chimney is the bond and the bedding: a stone works loose and can be moved by hand, a mortar bed behind a flat stone has washed out and left a void, or the joints have opened enough that water runs behind the face and starts taking the bed with it. The stone you are looking at is usually fine. What was holding it is not.

Cultured stone – manufactured stone veneer – fails in its own way, and it is worth knowing which you have. It is a cast concrete product with a decorative face, and when water gets behind it, it comes away in sheets rather than loosening unit by unit. The failure is normally at the installation, not the product: no weather-resistive barrier behind it, no weep screed at the bottom to let water out, or the stone run down into the ground where it wicks moisture permanently.

Repairing stone is slower work than brick because nothing is modular. Each stone has one orientation where it sits right, the joint widths are irregular by design, and a repointed section done to a uniform joint width announces itself from the street forever. We reset loose stone into a sound bed, rebuild washed-out beds behind flat stone, replace what has actually broken, and point to match the existing joint profile and colour rather than to a neat line.