Lakewood Masonry Contractor

Lakewood was built fast and built at once, which means most of what we work on here is the same age. Houses that went up between 1950 and 1955 came with a four-inch driveway slab, a low brick planter at the porch, and a block wall on the property line. Seventy-odd years on, all three are at the end of their service life at roughly the same time, and homeowners tend to call us when one of them finally cracks in a way they cannot ignore.

The driveways are the most common job. A slab that thin, poured on unimproved subgrade with no rebar, eventually settles into a shallow bowl and cracks across the middle. We tear it out, compact and gravel the base properly, tie in a rebar grid and pour four to five inches depending on what parks on it. Plenty of Lakewood clients go to pavers instead, which handle the ground movement better because the joints flex, and let you pull and reset a section instead of sawcutting a whole slab.

The brick is the other half of it. Porch columns, low garden walls and chimney stacks from that era have mortar that is well past due, and tuckpointing the joints costs a fraction of rebuilding what happens if you leave water getting in behind the face. We match the old mortar colour and joint profile so a repaired section does not read as a patch. Rear yards in Lakewood also give us room to work, so a good share of our jobs here end up as full backyard builds with an outdoor kitchen and a paved sitting area rather than a single repair.

Lakewood block walls are their own category of work. The original tract walls were built to 1950s standards, which generally means an undersized footing, light reinforcement and no pilasters, and after seventy years plenty of them have settled or cracked at the corners. Some can be repaired at the base and re-capped. Others have moved far enough that rebuilding is the honest answer, and we will show you the footing we uncovered rather than asking you to take our word for it.

City of Lakewood plan check is straightforward on residential work in our experience, and most of what we do here falls under a standard permit rather than needing engineering. The exception is anything retaining over four feet, which is rare on these flat lots, and any wall above six feet. Driveway approach and sidewalk work needs an encroachment permit, and since every Lakewood tract has city sidewalk fronting it, that comes up on most driveway replacements we quote.

The other constant here is stucco. Original garden walls and porch skirts were stuccoed, that finish is now decades past its colour coat, and cracks have opened at the corners and around the old porch posts. Repairing and refinishing them is usually a two or three day job that changes the front of the house more than anything else at the price, and we can do it in the same visit as brick or concrete work so you only have a crew on site once.