Masonry Contractor in Quartz Hill - Walls and Chimneys Fixed at the Cause

Enter your street address or parcel number on the county's building and safety permits page and click Find Services, and it shows which office handles your parcel. If the county handles it you'll get the local Building and Safety office, and if another office does, you'll get that office's contact instead. That check matters here because the Quartz Hill name also covers some neighboring parts of Lancaster and Palmdale, and we run it for every address before we start.

Retaining walls and fences over 6 feet are both named in the county's permit guidance, so plan on checking before we build one. For unincorporated property like Quartz Hill, LA County Public Works issues permits for new building, alterations, repairs and replacements, and its list also names patios and fireplaces. We check with the office for your address, and when a permit's needed we apply for it as your contractor.

In California, a contractor needs a state license when a job needs a building permit, uses employee labor, or comes to $1,000 or more in labor and materials. The Contractors State License Board also expects contractors, home improvement businesses included, to hold that license before they bid on your job. We're licensed and fully insured, and I'm glad to show you when I come out.

Your price comes from what the job really involves once I've seen it, and you get it as a written estimate before any work starts. A few things move it most here, like matching the color and size of older brick, getting materials into a back yard through a narrow side gate, and whether the footing under a wall needs work too. Patching a few joints now usually costs less than rebuilding a section later, and work the county's permit list covers adds a permit and inspections to the job.

Most cracks in a block wall start below it, when the footing settles or shifts and the wall follows. Sprinklers that soak the base, tree roots, a footing that was too shallow to begin with, and older walls built without enough steel are the usual reasons. A thin stair-step crack along the mortar can often be watched for a while, but a wall that leans or has split clean through the block should be looked at soon.

The best fix is to grind out the soft mortar and repack the joints with fresh mortar, which masons call tuckpointing, using a mix that's no harder than the brick around it. Mortar that's harder than old brick makes the brick itself crack and flake, so a quick smear over the top doesn't last. I'll also look for where the water's getting in, because that's usually why the mortar went soft in the first place.