Evansville Tuckpointing About Evansville Tuckpointing
Evansville Tuckpointing is an independently operated local service for one trade: the mortar, brick, and stone on Tri-State homes. We do tuckpointing, brick replacement, chimney work, foundation repointing, limestone repair, and lintel replacement across Evansville, Newburgh, Henderson, Boonville, Mount Vernon, Princeton, and Haubstadt, on both the Indiana and Kentucky side of the river. You send photos, we look at them, and the published price ranges tell you what the number should look like before we come out with mortar.
Why this exists
Two things go wrong when an Evansville homeowner searches for a mason. The first is that nobody publishes prices, so every bid is a blind negotiation and a $9,000 chimney rebuild gets sold where a $1,200 repoint and a new crown would do. The second is worse: a lot of repointing in this city is done with hard Portland mortar on soft pre-1930 brick, and the National Park Service, the Indiana DNR’s historic preservation office, and every mason who has watched a Riverside wall for twenty years agree that this destroys the brick. We set this business up around fixing both problems. Prices are on the pricing page. The mortar rule is on every service page.
How the work is matched to the house
Evansville’s brick comes in three broad generations, and we treat them differently:
- Pre-1930 soft brick in the Riverside, Washington Avenue, Bayard Park, Culver, and Independence historic districts and the rest of Haynie’s Corner, Goosetown, and Lamasco: lime-based mortar, hand tools where a grinder would chip the arris, joints tooled to the original profile.
- 1920s to 1950s brick in Lincolnshire and the older East Side: harder brick, usually a Type N match, careful attention to the limestone sills and steel lintels that were standard by then.
- Post-war and modern brick across the newer subdivisions and Newburgh’s 1960s and 1970s growth: Type N or S, and the failures are almost always at lintels, sills, and chimney crowns rather than in the field of the wall.
The assessment comes first, from photos and then on site: sounding the wall, mapping cracks, checking the crown and flashing, looking in the basement. A step crack over a window gets diagnosed as a lintel problem before we quote it as a mortar problem. See lintel and sill replacement for why that matters.
Licensing, insurance, and what we will not claim
Indiana has no state license for masons; the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency licenses plumbers and engineers, not contractors. Evansville and Vanderburgh County license the trade locally through the Building Commission, and the brick and masonry contractor license requires a $25,000 bond, general liability insurance, and continuing education. The City of Henderson, Kentucky requires its own specialty contractor license for masonry with $250,000 in liability coverage. Any mason on your wall has to hold what its jurisdiction requires, us included, so ask for the license and the insurance certificate before anyone touches the wall.
We publish no reviews we could not verify and cite no job count, and we keep a phone number out of the copy because the form is how your photos reach us. If your house sits in the Riverside Preservation Area or Lincolnshire, we will point you to what the Historic Preservation Commission’s District Guidelines say about masonry review before work starts, not after.
What you can expect
- An answer to photo submissions, measured against the published ranges.
- The honest option. If a chimney needs a crown and a repoint rather than a rebuild, that is the quote. If a foundation wall is moving rather than just shedding mortar, we will tell you that and point you to the right trade.
- Work scheduled in the April to November window when mortar cures properly, with heated-enclosure winter work priced as such.
- Mortar matched to the brick’s age, color, sand, and joint profile, and joints ground to depth rather than buttered over.
If you want to read more before sending photos, the FAQ covers costs, permits, timing, and the lime-versus-Portland question in detail, and the tuckpointing page walks through the process step by step.