Brickhouse

After a lovely evening with our friends Chuck and Doug, we bid goodnight and I walked them to the door. Thirty seconds after the door closed behind them the phone rang. It was Chuck.

"Come out here for a minute. I want to show you something."

So I joined Chuck out on my front porch. He was holding something in his hand.

"Do you know what this is?"

I did. I knew exactly what was in Chuck's hand. Mortar, he was holding bits and pieces of mortar the same color as the mortar between the bricks on our house.

"That's coming from way up there." He said as he pointed, "Somebody is going to get a brick on their head if you don't get that fixed."

Way up, all the way up, I could see blank spaces between the bricks where mortar should have been. In my mind dollar signs started filling all available space. I have a reserve fund in the bank, supposedly for things like this, and all I could think of was it crumbling along with those bricks. Despite the fact that it was a reserve fund, I kind of thought of it as my bucket list fund if nothing went wrong. So now there would be no bitching patio in the back yard. No Ford Model A car to play with. No trip to Spain. No SUV to replace the Ford Fusion. All the silly ideas I was planning to spend that money on evaporated in Chuck's hand. 

This past week I went on Yelp and looked up Masons. I picked the first three listed and made appointments. The first guy came out and looked at my bricks, climbed up on the roof, checked out my chimney, and gave me a quote.

"Your chimney is crumbling and needs to be rebuilt. You have flashing up there that is bad and needs to be repaired. Then there is that brick work on the front of the building. All together, $1,900."

Nineteen hundred dollars? I tried not to let on that I was relieved. I was seriously expecting five thousand, six thousand, or more. So I thanked the man and asked him to send me a written proposal. The second guy came over, stood out on the sidewalk in front of the building. He looked up, and said $1,400. Wow, even better. So I thanked him and asked him to send me a written proposal. The third guy also stood out on the front sidewalk, looked up, and told me, "Sure, no problem. We can do that for you."

I asked him if he had any idea how much it would cost. He told me that he wouldn't know that until he wrote up the proposal. About a week, he said, and he would know. But I persisted and asked him for a ball park figure.

"I don't really do ball park figures, but.... hmmm.... uh umm... " And after much thought and furrowed brows, he told me, "Around ten thousand dollars."

One thing I learned when getting our kitchen done, our plumbing done, and our home rewired, was to not give any hint to the bidder as to your feelings. So I told the man I would wait for his written proposal, I shook his hand, and forgot all about him. I gave the job to the first guy. Even though he was more than the second guy, at least he took the time to climb up onto the roof and figure out exactly everything that needed to be done. Now my only problem is that he wants to do it this week. Can you do brick work in sub-freezing temperatures? Won't the mortar freeze before it dries? Am I wrong to be worried?