Local guide

What to Watch on New Brick Veneer in Smyrna and La Vergne

A ten year old subdivision house is not old. It is just old enough for the details behind the brick to start reporting on how carefully they were built.

What the growth along I-24 actually built

Smyrna and La Vergne filled in fast, and they filled in with brick. Nashville commuters wanted a shorter drive than Murfreesboro offered and more house than Davidson County prices allowed, and production builders answered with subdivisions of brick fronted and brick wrapped homes put up on a schedule.

That stock is now at the age where things start to talk. Ten or fifteen years is not old masonry by any measure. It is exactly old enough for the buried details to report on how carefully they were installed, because most veneer defects need a decade of weather before they surface. None of this means the work was bad. Plenty of it was good. But a fast schedule is where hidden parts get shortened.

Veneer is a system and the parts that fail are hidden

Your brick is a single wythe standing on the foundation ledge. It carries itself and nothing else. The house behind it is framing, sheathing and a water resistive barrier, and between the two there should be an open air space of roughly an inch.

That space is a drain. Water gets through brick in wind driven rain, runs down the back face, lands on flashing and leaves through weep holes at the bottom course and above the windows. Corrugated ties nailed into the studs hold the brick upright without closing the cavity. Every one of those components disappears the moment the next course goes on, which is why problems announce themselves years later through the face of the wall rather than during the build.

The shortcuts that show up most often

These are not theories about builders. They are the specific things we find when walls of this vintage get opened, and most come from working quickly rather than dishonestly.

Mortar droppings in the cavity lead by a distance. As courses go up, mortar squeezes out of the back of each joint and falls. If nobody keeps the base clear, the droppings pile on the flashing and bury the weeps from behind, where clearing from outside never reaches them. Second is flashing that stops short: no end dams at the ends of a lintel flashing, no turn up behind the water resistive barrier, or sealant used where a flashing membrane belonged. It works fine for a few years while the caulk is fresh.

• Mortar droppings buried on the base flashing, blocking weeps from inside
• Weeps left out above windows and doors, where they matter most
• Lintel flashings with no turned up end dams
• Ties nailed to sheathing rather than into studs, or spaced too far apart
• A cavity built too tight to drain, or packed with insulation
• Long uninterrupted elevations with no movement joint
• Final grade backfilled above the weep line by the landscaping crew

The ten to fifteen year window

Symptoms arrive on a fairly predictable schedule, and freeze and thaw is the driver. Middle Tennessee crosses freezing repeatedly from December through February rather than staying below it, and each cycle works on whatever water the wall is holding.

The cosmetic tells come first. White efflorescence on the face, meaning water is moving through the wall and carrying salts out. Dark patches that stay wet days after everyone else's brick has dried. Then the real ones: brick faces spalling along the bottom course, stair step cracking from a window corner, or rust staining and a lifted joint over a garage opening where a steel lintel is corroding and jacking the brick above it.

Separately, our clay shrinks through a dry August and swells with spring rain, and a house on fill that never fully settled shows that movement in the brick first. Cracks that open and close seasonally behave differently from cracks that only widen, so photograph and date them before anyone quotes a repair.

HOA architectural control, which is real here

Most of these neighborhoods have an active homeowners association with an architectural review committee, and exterior masonry sits squarely inside what those committees govern. That often includes repairs, not just additions.

In practice it can mean approval before work starts, review of the replacement brick and mortar color, and limits on painting or coating brick the community wants left uniform.

We cannot tell you what your association requires and nor can anyone who has not read your documents. Rules vary street to street and get amended. Read your covenants and contact your board or management company before you commit to a scope, and build review time into the schedule, because a committee that meets monthly can add weeks to a three day job.

Matching brick when the run is discontinued

Here is the problem specific to subdivision brick. Your house came from one production run, of one brick, from one plant. Ten years later that unit may be out of production, and even where the name survives the current run can be visibly different.

A good match works on several things at once: base color, the blend and range within the pallet, face texture, and size, since brick dimensions are not universal. Mortar color matters as much as the brick and is what most often gets it wrong. A perfect brick in the wrong mortar reads as a patch from the street.

The trick that saves most repairs is harvesting. Take replacement units from a hidden part of your own house, behind a deck or inside a garage return, and put the new close match brick there instead. The visible wall stays original, and that is the difference between a repair you notice and one you do not.

A walkaround you can do this weekend

None of this needs a ladder or a contractor. Give the outside twenty minutes and photograph anything on the list, with the date, so next year has something to compare against.

Finding nothing gives you a baseline. Finding several things clustered on one elevation usually means one problem with one cause. Anything involving movement, a lifted lintel, a wall bulging out of plane, or cracking that widens month to month should be looked at rather than watched.

• Can you see the bottom course of brick, or has grade buried it
• Are there open weeps at the bottom course and above the windows
• Do downspouts discharge away from the wall or straight at the foundation
• Any efflorescence, permanently damp patches, or spalled brick faces
• Rust staining or a lifted joint over garage doors and wide windows
• Stair step cracks at window and door corners, photographed with a ruler
• Sprinkler heads throwing water onto the brick every morning

Related services: Brick Masonry · Stone Masonry