You ran a hand along the wall and came away with grit. Maybe the face of a brick has popped off altogether, leaving a rough orange pocket in an otherwise tidy wall.
The condition has a name, masons use it constantly, and knowing it makes everything else easier to look up.
Spalling is the name for a brick whose face has flaked, popped or crumbled off, and it starts when water soaks into the brick and then freezes. Most spalling is masonry repair. Spalling next to cracks, gaps or a wall that has moved is a structural question worth having answered before anything else.
Why the face of a brick pops off
A brick is not solid all the way through in the way it looks. Fired clay comes out of the kiln with a harder, denser skin on the outside and a softer, more absorbent body underneath. The skin is what sheds rain. Break the skin and the soft interior starts drinking.
Water that gets into that interior has to go somewhere when the temperature drops below 32 degrees. Water expands by roughly 9 percent as it turns to ice, and the pressure works outward against the one surface holding it in. Enough freeze and thaw cycles and the face lets go in a sheet.
Brick is graded for exactly this. ASTM C216, the standard specification for facing brick, sorts units into Grade SW for severe weathering and Grade MW for moderate weathering, and SW is the grade meant for walls that will freeze wet. Brick sold as interior or salvage brick was never rated for a wet freeze at all, which is why a repair done years ago with mismatched brick often spalls while the original wall around it stays clean.
Where the water is getting in
A wall that spalls is usually a wall that stays wetter than its neighbors, and the reason is almost always something you can point at from the driveway.
- A downspout that empties beside the wall instead of away from it
- Ground that has been built up over the years until mulch or soil covers the bottom course of brick
- A sprinkler head that hits the same three feet of wall every morning
- A gutter that overflows at one corner every hard rain
- A hose bib or an air conditioner condensate line dripping in one spot
There's also a drainage path built into your wall that most homeowners have never noticed. Brick veneer is designed to let water back out at the bottom through weep holes, which are gaps left in the vertical mortar joints of the first course. The International Residential Code, section R703.8.6, calls for weep holes at least 3/16 inch across and spaced no more than 33 inches on center. Mulch, soil or a new patio poured against the wall will block them, and a wall that cannot drain holds water in the brick where the freezing happens.
Is spalling brick cosmetic, or is it structural?
Sorting your own wall into one of three buckets gets you most of the way to an answer.
Scattered faces on an old wall
A handful of spalled faces spread randomly across a wall, with no cracks and no gaps, is wear. Houses built in metro Atlanta in the 1950s and 1960s are now seventy years into their weather, and some percentage of any old wall gives up its face. Nothing behind the brick is failing.
One patch that keeps growing
Spalling concentrated in one area, spreading year over year, is a live water problem rather than age. The brick is fine everywhere the water isn't. Finding what is wetting that patch and stopping it does more than any repair to the brick itself.
Spalling with movement around it
Spalling that shows up alongside stair-step cracks, a gap at a window, a wall that bulges when you sight along it, or brick dropping off above an opening is a different animal. Here the crumbling is a symptom rather than the problem. As the owner of Anglin's puts it: "when people call and they'll say, hey, I've noticed my brick wall is buckling, it's cracking, we have the knowledge to differentiate, is it a foundation, or is it a brick veneer, and why?"
Three places crumbling brick means more than a tired wall
The bottom course, right at the ground
Brick at grade takes splash-back from every storm and sits closest to whatever is holding water in the soil. Spalling low on the wall is usually a drainage story. Around metro Atlanta the ground story is water, slope and fill rather than soil that moves, since USDA soil survey data for the local map units rates them low for movement. So a wall down there is being worked on by water, and a wall that is also cracking is worth having looked at.
The brick above the garage opening
Brick above a garage door sits on a steel angle iron. Steel rusts, rust takes up more room than the steel it replaced, and the expansion pushes the brick courses apart from the inside. Spalled faces and dropping pieces over a garage opening frequently trace back to that steel rather than to weather. The owner describes the call almost word for word: "my stone, is falling off over my garage, because the garage wall has a crack in it." Cracks above the garage door covers how to read that opening.
The chimney above the roofline
A chimney is brick with weather on all four sides and no house behind it, so it dries slower and freezes harder than any wall. Spalling up there is common. Spalling up there combined with a chimney that has started to lean away from the house is two problems, and the lean is the one that decides the repair.
Who repairs spalled brick, and who repairs the wall behind it
Here is the honest division, and Anglin's states it plainly on its own brick wall repair page: spalled brick on a wall that is holding still is a general mason's job. Cutting out individual faces, replacing them with matched units and repointing the joints is masonry restoration, and Anglin's does not sell it as a standalone service.
What Anglin's does own is the wall itself. Where brick has moved, pulled away, dropped over an opening or ridden a settled footing down, the crew presses the wall back into position, anchors it to the framing through the mortar joints, and then does the masonry that finishes the job. The masonry comes bundled with the structural work rather than sold on its own, right down to hiding the anchors: "we put the mortar back over top of the head, so you can't see none of this in there, so it's mortared up, so you can't even know these are in there."
A family that started laying brick in 1930 will tell you which one you have at the free visit, even when the answer is a mason's phone number.
"Aligin work team came on time and proceeded right to work. Lintel corrections and brick repair done. Extremely happy with results."
Reginald Willingham, 5 stars
Reading your own wall before anyone comes out
Five minutes with a flashlight will tell you most of what a first visit would.
- Look at whether the spalling is scattered across the wall or clustered in one zone
- Check the bottom course for mulch, soil or concrete covering the weep holes
- Stand at a corner and sight down the wall to see whether it runs straight
- Look above every opening, especially the garage, for cracks climbing from the corners
- Check the same spots on the inside of the house for cracks in the drywall
- Watch the wall during the next hard rain and find where the water actually goes
Cracks only in the brick, with clean drywall inside, usually keep the problem in the veneer. Cracks on both sides of the wall point at the footing.
Frequently asked questions about crumbling and spalling brick
What is spalling brick?
Spalling brick is brick whose hard outer face has flaked, popped or crumbled away, exposing the softer clay body underneath. Water absorbed into the brick freezes, expands and pushes the face off from the inside, so spalling concentrates wherever a wall stays wet the longest.
Are spalling bricks dangerous?
Scattered spalling on a wall that is otherwise straight and crack-free is not a safety problem, though the exposed brick body will keep eroding once its skin is gone. Spalling that comes with cracks, a bulge, a gap at a window, or pieces dropping from above a garage opening deserves a look, because the wall behind it may have moved.
Why is the brick at the bottom of my wall crumbling first?
Brick at ground level absorbs splash-back from every roof drip and storm, and it sits against soil that stays damp long after the wall above has dried. Mulch, raised beds or a patio poured against the house make it worse by covering the weep holes the wall drains through.
Can I seal spalling brick to stop it?
Sealing is a common first instinct and it often backfires. A surface sealer slows water getting out as well as getting in, so a brick already carrying moisture freezes with nowhere to release the pressure. Getting the water off the wall does more good than anything painted on it.
Does painting brick cause it to spall?
Paint that does not breathe can, yes. Brick handles water by absorbing it and giving it back up, and a film that blocks evaporation keeps the moisture in the brick body through every freeze. Painted walls that begin shedding paint chips with brick face attached are showing exactly that.
Should I replace a spalled brick or leave it?
A few spalled faces on a sound, dry wall can be left alone for years with no consequence beyond appearance. Replacement makes sense once the face loss goes deep enough to reach the mortar joints, or once the spalling is spreading, and at that point the water source needs fixing first or the new brick goes the same way.
Find out whether your brick is old or actually moving
Bring out a fourth-generation mason and get a straight answer about what your wall is doing. If the brick is holding still, you'll hear that, and you'll know to call a general mason for the face work. If the wall has moved, you'll find out what moved it and what putting it back costs.
Call 770-422-2924 for a free look.