Brick wall installation in Salinas CA - a straight wall with nothing to repaint

Most people who call me want a wall along a property line, around a patio or beside a driveway, and they want to know it won't lean or need paint down the road. The price moves with the wall's length, height and thickness, the brick you pick, how much digging the footing takes and whether piers or a bend in the line add brick. The schedule turns on the size of the wall, the weather while we lay it and whether a permit has to be issued first. My written estimate gives you your own figure, with the reasons behind it.

I start by walking the line with you and going over how we'll keep a freestanding wall standing straight, whether that's a wider base, piers or a bend in the line, and how each one will look in your yard. Then our crew marks the layout, digs out and pours the footing, because that's the part nobody sees later and the part the whole wall rests on. We lay the brick course by course in a mortar mix chosen for that brick, and I'm on site checking level and line as it goes up. We tool each joint so it sheds water, leave the brick bare unless you want it otherwise so there's nothing to repaint, and clean up before we leave.

Some yards call for related work. If you'd rather have natural stone, or stone caps on a brick wall, we do stone masonry as well. If you already have an older brick wall that's sound but has crumbling joints, brick pointing, where we rake out the worn mortar and pack in fresh, is usually a smaller job than a new wall, and I'll tell you if that's all it needs.

Whether your wall needs a permit depends on the job, and that's the city's call, not ours. Inside Salinas, the City of Salinas Permit Center reviews, issues and inspects building permits, and its planning staff handle zoning and site plan reviews. When your wall needs a permit, we handle the application and the inspections with the city or county office that covers your property and keep you posted on where it stands.

Monterey County's permit office calls this a high seismic region, where soils investigations, a study of the ground under a structure, are generally required for all structures, so I bring that up early on any lot the county covers. Much of the area maps as Salinas soil, deep and well drained and laid down by moving water, but a soil map describes the area and not your lot, so we size and dig the footing for the ground we actually find. We plan footings the same way on jobs in Gonzales and Castroville. We're based in Salinas and work in the cities around it, and if your city isn't on our list, call and ask.