Masonry Work...

While it is definitely winter here in Leadville, it's much warmer in Salida. And since our Masonry teacher is from Salida, our class has been lucky to get some real hands on experience at masonry restoration.

Our teacher, owner of Stone Craft Masonry Restoration and Preservation in Salida, does preservation work all over the state. Currently he's working on a project in Salida at the Touber Building. Currently Salida's city hall, it was once a hospital.

I think it's a pretty awesome building, so when I got to work there by myself one day, I was super excited! The building is actually in pretty good shape- especially for being about 100 years old. There is a good amount of weathering on the brick however. And the building owners are doing the right thing by addressing it now rather than waiting for total disrepair. Much of the stone work and brick needs to be repaired, a few cracks need to be patched, and as always with masonry work, joints need to be cleaned and re-pointed.

This is where I was able to help. With my limited skills I could still clean out the joints and re-point them. I cleaned out the joints with some simple tools, then mixed a batch of mortar consisting of two parts sand and one part lime. After that I began to re-point the joints with the mortar. This was super fun, I really enjoy getting my hands dirty and actually contributing to life of this historic building.

I also removed some bricks from the stairwell that all need to be replaced. The joints in this area are not solid, and for the structural integrity of the building, it's best to remove them all, save the good brick, and replace with good mortar.


Besides the work that I did, we also visited the building as a class a few times. This is a great classroom let me tell you! One very cool thing that I discovered happened when I was cleaning out a joint underneath a window. This particular window happened to have a large stone lintel under it. The joint here was pretty big. As I was cleaning it out, I found a whole bunch of newspaper stuffed in the back. It was very brittle and I couldn't find a date anywhere, but if I had to guess, I'd say the paper was from the first few years of the 20th century. Really cool! This was a great experience to learn first hand knowledge of masonry restoration work.



The buildings choice of fountains however I must question. I found this one particularly creepy...why is he looking at his boot like that...??