" Over the years the original brick facade on the Sumner house has suffered from misguided restoration attempts. From this we can learn about proper preservation and restoration procedures for an antique brick -- And Tom here we're looking at the original early eighteen hundred's brick. In a wonderful example of why you should never sandblast right that's right because see how coarse the surface is and how the actual. Outside fire skin. Has been removed from the brick we have in the soft inner core now can this be restored it cannot be restored to its permanent damage so you have one option I suppose which is to point it up and repaint it again. The today and it wasn't uncommon for a federal house to be paid it back effort very often. In the 1800 they would paint them dark red and actually score the mortar lines in quite often on some of the best buildings yeah but here. I suppose what about putting some sort of masonry sealer on it. One has to be very very careful with masonry -- that's because often they will trap moisture within the -- and they can lead to accelerate its falling of the bricks. So if you do have paint on old brick walls may be the best thing is to use some sort of commercial paint remover like. A caustic solider. Yes -- some of the peel away type products work fairly well. Or -- in a solvent based stripper now what can you tell us about the condition of the the mortar. In these joints. Or we see here actually is that this is a lime and sand mortar the original water. That has survived even better than the bricks have under the sandblasted but very often when people patch and repoint. They use a Portland cement mortar that really stands out like a sore -- so how do you figure out the right -- ordered you to that not only does the Portland cement mortar stand out. But it also is too hard for the bricks will put stress on the bricks -- bricks will fail."

" Is to reduce the Mason's chisel and to loosen a section of water."

" And -- it -- and and then we can crush it. One can typically just crush it under hand pressure. This soft lime and sand mortar typically has a compressive strength of about sort of if -- OK and so one can crush it fairly well it might have to use it and we're. But he can see here. So we've. We crushed up some samples and how's this gonna help us well what we can do so is leak and dissolve out the lime binder. By using vinegar. You're just. Household distilled white vinegar. And if we pour some of that into the solution. We'll get a a reaction. There will be a slight amount of visiting here. And it will dissolve out the line. No one can also use muriatic acid which will work much faster but of course the muriatic. Unlike a little bit more houses too -- to work with so what does this tell you once it's dissolved OK go. We typically let it let it fizz for a few minutes -- I'll move right ahead here will be completely detested politically. We let it -- we can start to see the sand down in the bottom of the of the jar yeah. And then we can just pour off the solution. Yeah. And we're left with the sand that was originally used for the mortar in our jar. We've gotten rid of the line we've gotten rid of the line and from what we can see here is a fairly fine sand. We could put this on a paper towel let it dry for a few minutes right and then we could have a sand that we could match we could take that's Angela mason. And we could say match this sand we want the same color we want the same texture and then you're making a lime mortar you have a lime mortar that will match what was originally there excellent."