Brick Cleaning

Brick is the most common wall material in Sydney and the most misjudged. Modern extruded brick shrugs off weather for a century; the older brick that built Paddington, Woollahra and half the North Shore is a different material wearing the same face — softer, more porous, and held together by lime mortar that was designed to be the sacrificial element. Cleaning the two the same way is how brick walls get ruined.

Why brick cleaning goes wrong

The classic failure is pressure. On older walls, a pressure wand strips the lime mortar out of the joints before the brick face even looks clean — and open joints let water into a wall that usually has no modern damp course. Old bricks also carry a fired surface skin harder than their core; strip that skin and the brick face spalls and powders permanently. The second failure is acid: brickies’ hydrochloric has a narrow legitimate use on mortar smears, but as a wall cleaner it burns and mottles the brick, dissolves the joints, and mobilises iron in the clay into orange staining that wasn’t there before. And it must never touch the sandstone sills and quoins built into most period brickwork — acid etches those on contact.

How we clean brickwork

We identify the wall first: brick type, mortar type, age, and what’s actually on it. Green and black biological growth gets a biocide soft wash with proper dwell time, so it dies at the root instead of regrowing within a season. General atmospheric grime lifts with gentle detergent chemistry and a low-pressure rinse. White powdery bloom is efflorescence — a moisture symptom that gets its own treatment, starting dry. Vine damage and sucker marks from ivy and creeping fig are patient hand work. On sound modern brick, controlled moderate pressure with a fan tip finishes the job; on lime-mortar and heritage walls, pressure stays in the van.

Heritage brick is our home ground

Victorian and Federation brickwork — including tuck-pointed facades where the decorative putty lines are a century old and irreplaceable — is cleaned the same careful way as our heritage sandstone work: low pressure across the wall, never into the joints, with every fragile element identified before water moves. If your terrace sits in a conservation area, cleaning is maintenance and needs no approval — but we’ll flag anything on the facade that does.

What you get

A fixed written quote after seeing the actual wall, the method stated per surface, gardens protected and rinsed, and a walk-around before we pack up. Brick cleaning pairs naturally with a full house wash or boundary wall clean in the same visit.