Lintel Replacement in Downers Grove, IL — Ask Whoever Quotes It How They Plan to Hold the Wall Up

Read enough masonry websites and the lintel pages start to blur together. Most of them get the science right: steel corrodes, rust expands, the brick above lifts and cracks. Several correctly describe installing flashing and end dams with the new steel.

Then you notice what is missing from nearly all of them.

None of them say how the wall stays up while the old lintel comes out.

That step is called shoring, and it is the single clearest quality-and-safety tell in a lintel scope. Lintel replacement in Downers Grove, IL starts there, because everything else is downstream of it.

Paul Lally's Masonry Inc. is a family-owned, insured masonry contractor serving Chicago and the Chicagoland suburbs since 1988 — tuckpointing, brick repair and replacement, chimney repair and rebuilds, lintel replacement, masonry restoration, and waterproofing for residential and commercial properties. Built on Craftsmanship. Backed by Experience. Free on-site estimates — call (708) 448-8866.

Rust does not thin steel. It expands it.

A lintel is the structural member carrying the masonry above an opening. Cut a hole in a brick wall for a window, a door or a garage, and something has to hold up the brick that would otherwise occupy the hole. On most Downers Grove houses that something is a steel angle iron bedded into the wall.

Steel corrodes when water and oxygen reach it, and inside a brick wall water reaches it constantly — through the joints, off the window head, out of a gutter that overflows in the same spot every autumn. As it corrodes it converts to iron oxide, which occupies several times the volume of the original metal. It cannot push down, because the window frame is there. So it pushes up.

The trade calls it rust jacking, and it leaves an unmistakable signature.

Signs of a failing lintel

• A straight horizontal crack in the mortar joint directly above a window, door or garage opening
• Rust staining bleeding down the brick beneath that joint
• The course above the opening lifted out of plane with the rest of the wall
• Cracked or displaced brick at the corners of the opening, sometimes stepping diagonally away
• A visible steel edge at the head that is flaking or delaminating in layers
• On a garage or a storefront, a measurable sag across the span
• Windows and doors gone out of square at the head

Our guide to failing lintels and cracked brick above windows walks the diagnosis.

Shoring, and why it belongs in writing

Here is what happens during a lintel replacement. The brick above the opening is taken down. The corroded steel is cut out. For a period, there is nothing where the structural member used to be.

Shoring is the temporary support — posts, needles, or a beam — placed beneath that masonry before anything is removed, carrying the load while the swap happens. Done properly it is unremarkable. Skipped, it is how a section of wall comes down on a crew or on a homeowner's front walk.

So when you compare quotes, ask one question: how will you support the masonry above the opening while the old lintel is out? A real answer is specific. A vague one, or a scope document that never mentions it at all, tells you something worth knowing before work starts.

The other thing most pages leave out

Lintels do not fail one at a time.

Every lintel on a given elevation went in during the same build, from the same unprotected steel, in the same exposure, and has been wet on the same schedule for the same number of decades. They corrode as a cohort.

Which means the crack you noticed is usually the first of several — and that changes the economics of the job substantially. Replacing three openings in one mobilisation, with the staging already up, costs meaningfully less than replacing them one at a time over three years as each announces itself.

Our estimates itemise every opening on the affected elevation, with what needs doing now and what can reasonably wait, rather than pricing only the one you called about. That is not upselling — it is the cheaper path, and we will say plainly which openings are not urgent.

Downers Grove, specifically

Three building stocks, and lintels behave differently in each.

The pre-war neighbourhoods near downtown and the BNSF line. Solid masonry homes from the 1910s through the 1940s, with older unprotected steel and, in places, stone lintels instead. Stone fails differently — cracking and delaminating along its bedding rather than rust-jacking — and where steel sits hidden behind or beneath stone, that gets assessed too.

The post-war expansion. Ranches, split-levels and Georgians through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, with wide front picture windows and attached garage openings. This is the bulk of the lintel work in the village: long spans, minimal original flashing, and steel now seventy years into an Illinois climate.

The downtown commercial blocks along Main, Curtiss and Warren, plus the Ogden Avenue and Butterfield corridors — storefront spans, transom heads and service door openings, where the masonry above sits directly over a public sidewalk.

Teardown replacement construction across the village is brick and stone veneer, where the relevant steel is often a continuous shelf angle behind the wall rather than a discrete lintel — corroding out of sight and showing up as horizontal cracking at a consistent height.

Add the DuPage freeze-thaw cycle — dozens of thaw-and-refreeze events a season working on wet steel — and you have close to ideal conditions for lintel corrosion.

How we do the work

1. Assess the whole elevation, not the one crack. Every opening on that wall is the same age.
2. Shore the masonry above the opening before anything is removed.
3. Take down the brick above the lintel carefully, salvaging units for reuse.
4. Cut out and remove the corroded steel.
5. Set new protected steel, correctly sized for the span and properly bedded at both bearing ends.
6. Install flashing and a drip edge with end dams, so water leaving the wall goes out rather than back in.
7. Relay the masonry, reusing salvaged units and blending replacements for size, colour and texture.
8. Repoint with matched mortar and clean down.

Materials

Correctly sized, protected steel. Mortar matched in type — Type N or Type S as the wall genuinely calls for — and matched in colour and joint profile so a repaired head does not read as a patch. Salvaged brick reused wherever sound, because nothing blends with a seventy-year-old wall like the units already in it. Flashing detailed continuous with end dams, because flashing that stops short of the ends simply drains into the wall.

What drives the cost

Span width and the number of openings. Height and access — a second-storey window needs staging a ground-floor slider does not. How much masonry must be shored and relaid. Whether the brick can be matched or must be sourced. Whether flashing is being installed. Whether stone lintels or sills are involved alongside the steel. Weather windows, since mortar needs workable temperatures to cure.

We publish no rates, because no honest number exists before someone looks at the opening. Free on-site estimate, in writing — call (708) 448-8866.

Why it should not wait

A lintel is a structural member. Once the steel has lost section, the masonry above the opening is being carried by something that is no longer what it was designed to be — and on an entry or a garage, that masonry is directly above a route people use daily.

Deferral also grows the scope. A lintel caught early is a lintel, shoring and a few courses. Left five more winters, it is frequently a lintel plus a considerably larger rebuilt section.

Serving Downers Grove and the surrounding DuPage suburbs

We work throughout Downers Grove and the communities around it — Westmont, Lisle, Woodridge, Clarendon Hills, Hinsdale and Darien. Related services: lintel repair and replacement, brick repair, brick replacement, tuckpointing and repointing, and limestone and sill repair.

For the full picture of what happens above and below an opening, read masonry around windows and openings.

Have the elevation looked at, not just the crack

Family-owned since 1988, insured, and our name is on every job.

Get a free on-site estimate — or call (708) 448-8866. Built on Craftsmanship. Backed by Experience.