Some bricks along my garage wall are cracked. Can those be replaced without rebuilding the wall?
Answer
Yeah — if it’s just a handful of bricks, there’s no reason to tear the whole wall apart. We’ve done a lot of these in Macomb Township.
I get why people think pulling bricks from the bottom is going to make the whole wall come down — logically it sounds right. But that’s not how it works. There are wall ties behind the brick that hold it back to the structure, so when we remove a few damaged bricks, the wall isn’t just going to collapse.
Now, those ties aren’t meant to hold everything up forever — you still need the lower rows of brick to support the rest of the wall. But they absolutely hold things in place while we remove the damaged bricks and replace them properly.
We’ll cut out the bad bricks, clean everything up, match the replacements, and reset them so it all blends back in and is structurally sound again.
