Better late than never! The May 29th Lunch and Learn Lecture by David Logan of Vintage, Inc. is live on YouTube for viewing. David talks about lime mortar and its importance in maintaining historic buildings, particularly in relation to moisture migration. Audience questions address the phenomenon of “rising damp” and whether that may be a misattribution of condensation in some cases, how to deal with painted brick surfaces and previous Portland cement repointing, and a discussion of various types of lime mortar, where to obtain it, and how to color match it to your project. A number of buildings around Winchester are featured.
As David mentions in the beginning of this lecture, this is not an exercise in shaming or criticizing buildings which have not been repointed in lime mortar. Many buildings in Winchester have been sandblasted to remove paint, coated with impermeable paints prone to failure, or repointed with a Portland-based mortar. Especially at a time when preservation was a new field, it was not known how badly the wrong treatment could impact a building in the long term. Please take these examples as cautionary tales. It is often much more expensive and difficult to correct a bad treatment than to let the building suffer some benign neglect until the issue can be properly addressed.