Lintel Replacement in Lemont, IL — The Rusting Steel Behind Your Cracked Brick

Rust occupies several times the volume of the steel it came from. That single fact explains nearly every cracked window head in Lemont.

Put a piece of steel angle iron above a window, load it with a few hundred pounds of brick, and let water reach it for forty or fifty years. As it corrodes it swells — and it can't push down through the window frame, so it pushes up, lifting the masonry it was installed to carry. Lintel replacement in Lemont, IL is the fix for that, and Paul Lally's Masonry has been doing it across Chicagoland since 1988.

What a lintel is

Brick can't span an opening on its own. Every window, door, and garage opening in a masonry or brick-veneer wall needs something beneath the masonry to carry the load across the gap. That's the lintel — on most Lemont homes, a piece of painted structural steel angle iron set into the wall so only a thin dark edge shows above the window frame. On the village's older limestone-era buildings, you may have stone lintels instead.

It's a simple, dependable component with exactly one enemy: water.

Rust jacking, step by step

1. Water reaches the steel — through failed mortar joints above the opening, gapped sealant at the window head, a leaking gutter, or missing flashing.
2. The steel corrodes.
3. Rust expands to several times the volume of the original steel.
4. That expansion has nowhere to go but up, lifting the brick course sitting on the lintel.
5. The mortar joint above opens into a horizontal crack. Bricks crack, step cracks radiate from the opening's top corners, and the gaps admit more water.
6. More water, more rust, more expansion. It compounds.

This is why filling the crack accomplishes nothing. The crack is not the problem — it's the visible result of steel that's still swelling behind it. Caulk it and it reopens, usually within a season, often right beside the patch.

Signs of a failing lintel

• A horizontal crack in the mortar joint directly above a window, door, or garage opening
• Step cracks running diagonally up from the top corners of an opening
• Cracked or displaced brick in the course immediately above
• Rust staining — orange-brown streaks bleeding down the brick below the lintel line
• A visibly bowed, sagging, or lifted brick course above the opening
• Flaking, layered rust on the exposed steel edge
• Loose brick above a window you can rock by hand
• A window gone out of square, or one that sticks and binds
• Water stains on drywall or plaster above a window head

Garage openings deserve particular attention — they're the widest openings on most homes, so that lintel carries the most load and tolerates section loss the least.

What waiting costs

Rust jacking never plateaus. The steel keeps losing section while it keeps expanding, so you're simultaneously losing capacity and gaining destructive force.

The scope grows with it. Replacing steel with a few courses of brick above is routine work. Wait, and the brick above the opening loses bearing, more units crack, the window head goes out of square, and now you're rebuilding masonry, sourcing matching brick, and possibly dealing with a window that no longer fits its own opening. A lintel is one of the few masonry items where waiting is genuinely expensive.

How Paul Lally's Masonry replaces a lintel

1. Inspect the opening and the wall above it, determining whether the steel is salvageable or spent and how far damage runs into the surrounding brick.
2. Shore the masonry above. Before any steel moves, the brick above the opening is temporarily supported. This step separates a proper lintel job from a dangerous one.
3. Carefully remove the brick courses sitting on the lintel, salvaging sound units — reused original brick is always the best match.
4. Cut out and remove the corroded steel.
5. Set the new lintel — properly sized for the span and load, with correct bearing at each end, and protected against corrosion.
6. Address the water path. The lintel didn't rust for no reason, so we look at the joints, flashing condition, and sealant at the head.
7. Relay the brick on the new steel, matching coursing and keeping the wall plane true.
8. Repoint with matched mortar — color, sand, type, and joint profile matched to the existing wall.
9. Remove shoring, clean up, and walk the work with you.

Materials

New lintels are structural steel sized for the span and the load above, with corrosion protection appropriate to the exposure. Brick salvaged from the opening wherever possible, supplemented with matched units where originals cracked. Mortar matched for type, color, sand, and joint profile — standard Type N on most residential work, Type S only where structure and exposure genuinely call for it, and softer mixes on older, softer brick.

For stone lintels, the approach changes: limestone fails by cracking, spalling, and delaminating along its bedding planes rather than by rust-jacking, so depending on the damage it may be patched with matched stone repair mortar, repaired with a Dutchman — cutting out only the failed portion and letting in a matching piece of new stone — or replaced. And where steel is hidden behind or beneath the stone, that gets assessed too.

The detail that decides how long any new lintel lasts isn't the steel grade. It's keeping water out of the wall above it. That's why lintel work and tuckpointing are so often scoped together.

What drives the cost

• Width of the opening — a garage door span is a different piece of steel than a bathroom window
• Number of lintels failing (they fail in batches — same age, same exposure)
• Height and access — ground floor versus second story with staging
• How much brick must be removed, shored, and relaid
• Brick matching difficulty where original units cracked
• Related repairs — repointing above the opening, sealant at the head, gutter and drainage issues feeding the wall
• Stone lintel work, where matching and fabrication add lead time

No honest mason prices a lintel from the driveway or over the phone. Paul Lally's Masonry gives a free on-site estimate in writing.

Local context: Lemont's two kinds of masonry

Lemont is unusual among the southwest suburbs because it holds two very different masonry populations, and lintels fail differently in each.

The historic village — the old downtown along the canal and the streets around it — carries genuine nineteenth-century construction, much of it built with local Lemont limestone, the honey-colored dolomite quarried right here and used across Chicago in the 1800s. Those buildings have stone lintels and sills, soft lime-based mortar, and masonry now well over a century old. They need a careful hand: soft stone, softer mortar, and Dutchman repairs rather than replacement wherever the original stone can be saved.

The newer stock — the subdivisions that came with Lemont's growth from the 1970s onward — is brick and brick veneer over frame, with wide picture windows and two- and three-car garage openings on ungalvanized steel angle iron. That steel is now thirty to fifty years into service, which is exactly when rust jacking shows up.

Both sit in the same climate: repeated hard freeze-thaw cycling, wet springs, and wind-driven rain, with the failures concentrating on north and west elevations and above the widest openings. If you're seeing that horizontal crack above one window, check the others on the same elevation — lintels installed the same year in the same exposure tend to go on the same schedule.

Related masonry services in Lemont

Lintel work is almost always scoped alongside tuckpointing and repointing above the opening, brick repair and brick replacement for cracked units, limestone and sill repair on the historic stock, caulking and joint sealant at window heads, and masonry waterproofing once the wall is sound. Where several openings and elevations are involved, see residential masonry restoration; for period buildings, historic masonry restoration.

Worth reading: failing lintels and cracked brick above windows and step cracks in brick walls. Nearby: tuckpointing in Lemont, masonry restoration in Lemont, lintel replacement in Orland Park, and limestone and sill repair in Hinsdale.

Get the steel looked at before the brick decides for you

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.

If your lintel can be cleaned, treated, and saved, we'll say so. If it's spent, we'll show you the steel. Either way you get a straight answer and a written number. Our family name is on every job.

Free on-site estimates — call (708) 448-8866 or request an estimate online.