Commercial masonry

Yes. Fackrell Masonry and Construction works out of Nampa in the Treasure Valley and Blackfoot in eastern Idaho. The service area is all of Southern Idaho, between the Oregon and Wyoming borders, as far north as McCall, Stanley, New Meadows and Salmon. Start with a quote by clicking here.

Yes. Fackrell Masonry and Construction holds Idaho Contractors License RCE-41697 and Idaho Department of Public Works registration 017315, and is Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 30 Construction Certified. The company is veteran owned, and certificates of insurance go to whoever needs one before the crew shows up.

I'm a mason and not a lawyer, so take the legal half to somebody who is. The practical answer, and the one every property manager I've worked with operates on, is that it's the building owner's problem.

What tends to matter more than the falling brick is what you did once you knew about it. Documented, addressed and fenced off is a very different position from a photo somebody took on their phone six months ago. That's one reason a written assessment is worth having even when you're not ready to do the work yet. It shows the problem was identified and it dates the decision.

In the immediate term, get the area underneath closed off. Loose brick at the top of a parapet or a chimney standing over a public entrance is the part I deal with first on any building, whatever else is wrong with it, and that isn't caution for its own sake.

Then find out how much more of the building is in the same condition. Brick coming off in one place is rarely the only brick doing it.

Urgent. Parapets are the part of a commercial building I worry about most.

A parapet is the wall standing up above the roofline. It's exposed on both faces and across the top, so it takes weather from every direction while the rest of the building only takes it from one. That's why it's usually the roughest-looking masonry on any building, and it isn't an accident. On top of that it's often carrying coping stones or metal, and anything loose up there is directly over a sidewalk or an entrance.

So the order is this. Close off what's below it. Then have it looked at properly from a lift, because nobody can assess a parapet from the ground, myself included.

Repairs run from repointing, to rebuilding the top courses, to taking the parapet down and rebuilding it. Which one you're looking at depends on how far the damage runs, and that's the question the lift answers.

The whole thing. Vehicle damage to a storefront usually carries past the stone into the framing and the interior, and Fackrell Masonry and Construction has many years of general construction behind it as well as masonry. Framing, sheathing and the stone all get handled by the same crew.

If there's an insurance claim behind it, say so at the start. What gets photographed before demolition begins is what an adjuster has to work from, and once the wall is down it can't be recreated.

It's the unit everybody quotes in and it's very nearly useless for comparing bids on a building.

A large building is never one condition. One elevation is failing, one is fine, the parapet is worse than both, and the north face has moss in the joints. A single rate spread across all of that is the contractor's average, and his average depends entirely on how much he decided to include.

What actually moves the number is access, more than anything else. A lift, scaffold or swing stage on a tall face can rival the masonry itself. After that it's how deep the joints have to be cut, how much brick replacement turns up once they're open, the joint size, and whether the work has to be sequenced around a building that stays open and in use.

So ask for the price broken out by elevation and by scope instead of as one rate. It's more work for the bidder, and it's the only way you'll see where two prices actually differ.

Masonry is patient. A wall gives you years of warning before it does anything dramatic, and all of that warning is too small to read from forty feet away. Eroded joints, hairline cracking over a window, a parapet starting to lean. None of it announces itself, and all of it is far cheaper early than late.

On a building with no visible symptoms an assessment is a budgeting tool instead of an emergency. It tells you what's urgent, what can wait a season, and what's only cosmetic.

It also changes what happens when you start collecting prices. If every contractor is working from the same written list, you're comparing three prices for one job. If each one decides for himself what to include, you're comparing three prices for three different jobs, and the cheapest is usually cheapest because it covers the least. On a building with a lot of brick, what got left off can add up to whole walls.

Every few years for a building in reasonable shape, and yearly on anything with a parapet, a stack, or heavy brick standing over an entrance.

That's not a code requirement and I won't dress it up as one. It's the interval at which problems are still cheap. Masonry is patient. A wall gives you years of warning before it does anything dramatic, and all of that warning is too small to read from the parking lot.

There are also moments that should trigger a look regardless of the calendar. After anything hits the building. After a hard freeze-thaw winter. Before you re-roof, because that's when access is cheapest and somebody is already up there. When you take on a building you didn't build. And when an insurance renewal starts asking questions about the envelope, which they increasingly do.

The order to avoid is finding out what your building needs from the contractor you already hired to fix part of it.

Both. New work includes the stone veneer on the Industrial Metals building and the masonry construction of the Blackfoot McDonald's. Repair work runs from repointing an entire commercial envelope to rebuilding a storefront after a vehicle hits it. Start either one by clicking here.

Yes. Past work includes the chimney at the Owyhee County Courthouse in Murphy, the chimney stack on Hangar 208 at Mountain Home Air Force Base, brick repair, repointing, cleaning and sealing at Swan Valley School, and multiple United States Forest Service comfort stations. Public work means paperwork a private job never asks for, and a building that usually has to stay open and in use while you work on it. Neither one is new here.