Kentucky Facade Restoration & Waterproofing Services

Ohio Valley Freeze-Thaw And Humidity

Kentucky sits in the Ohio Valley, which gives it a winter cold enough to freeze water inside a wall and a summer humid enough to keep that wall from ever drying out. Water enters a hairline crack, freezes, expands and widens the opening it entered through, and the damage accumulates quietly rather than arriving all at once. Over a decade that turns a joint needing recaulking into spalled brick and a wall that leaks under wind-driven rain.

The humidity is what makes it worse here than the temperature alone would. A wall that takes on water in January and stays damp through a humid summer never gets the drying period masonry depends on. Embedded steel corrodes, mortar stays soft, and the next freeze starts from a wetter wall than the last one did.

Cast Iron And Historic Masonry Downtown

Louisville's West Main Street holds one of the largest collections of cast-iron building fronts anywhere in the country, and cast iron is a material most contractors never touch. It fails by corrosion at the joints and behind the fasteners, expanding as it rusts and cracking the sections it is bolted to, and it needs a paint system and a joint detail chosen for iron rather than whatever is on the truck. The same downtown holds a great deal of soft nineteenth century brick and limestone, where the wrong cleaning method or the wrong repointing mortar does more damage in a week than the weather does in twenty years.