Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Applicants with requests before the DDRC are allotted a presentation time of 10 minutes. This time should include, but is not limited to an overview of the project, case history, and any pertinent meetings held regarding the request. This time also includes all persons presenting information on behalf of the applicant, such as attorneys, engineers, and architects. This time limit does not include any questions to ask by the DD DTRC or staff regarding requests. Sorry guys, we're having some technical issues here today. So, yes, members of the general public are given the opportunity to address their concerns in intervals of two minutes. Applicants may have five minutes to respond. Staff has a timer and will make presenters aware of when their time is expired. Are there any changes to the agenda?

We've had two changes to the agenda. Um, both are under the regular agenda. 11:08 Queen Street. A request for construction of a single family home in the old Shanden Lower Waverly Protection Area Area A has been deferred as has 2331 Gadston Street. Request for design approval for construction of an accessory structure in the Elmwood Park Architectural Conservation District. The DDRC uses the consent agenda to approve non-controversial or routine matters by a single motion and vote. If a member of the DDRC or the general public wants to discuss an item on the consent agenda, that item is removed from the consent agenda and considered during the meeting. The DDRC then approves the remaining consent agenda items. Will staff please read the consent agenda?

Certainly. The first is 16371639 Enerey Avenue. This is a request for preliminary certification of the Bailey bill in the Wales Garden Architectural Conservation District. The second is 2214 Wallace Street request for preliminary certification of the Bailey Bill also in the Cottontown Belleview Architectural Conservation District. 2408 Stark Street, request for design approval for construction of a single family home in the old Shanden Lower Waverly Protection Area Area A and 21 Jerb Street, request for preliminary certification of the Bailey Bill in the Waverly Protection Area. Is there anyone from the public that would like to have an item removed from the consent agenda? Is there anyone from the DDRC that would like to have an item removed from the consent agenda? Okay. With that, I'll open up for a motion and a second to accept um the consent agenda and also the August minutes.

I'll move for approval of the August minutes and the all four items on the consent agenda, including all the staff recommendations. Second, Miss Jacob. Yes. Mr. Lee Decker. Yes. Mr. McKenzie. Yes. Mr. Celibbe, yes. Mr. Shelton, yes. And Miss Thomas, yes. Motion passes. And Mr. Greenberg? Yes. Thank you. Motion passes.

Great. So, we don't not have any regular agenda at this time. So, we'll move straight to other business.

So, we have a short presentation um today uh that Miss Walling is going to give. We've been talking for a little bit about doing some short presentations every couple of months when our agenda is light. These will be educational um presentations and these are items that staff routinely sees and uh has to deal with and work with and uh reviews if you will. So, we wanted to make sure that y'all were fully informed on on these items. So today it's going to be about removing paint from brick which is as you know a hot topic item. All right. Exciting.

Yeah. So largely about brick in general and we will talk about paint removal too. All right. So, not going to go into what a brick is cuz hopefully you all know what that is. Um, but generally speaking, when we're looking at a brick building, exterior bricks are fired in a kiln. They have a protective exterior coating on the brick, um, which makes it a hard, durable material. Inside the brick is going to be a little softer because it's not getting the direct heat from the kilm. Mortar, as I'm sure y'all have probably heard us say before, is a sacrificial element on a brick building. It is meant to move with the building as the building expands, contracts, freeze, thaws, and lets uh water vapor in and out. So, that will go through the mortar. So, it's totally normal, what you see here, to have mortar deteriorated. Um, it's probably some deferred maintenance. it shouldn't be quite that deteriorated. Um, but the parts of the mortar, the brick, they have to work together. They have to be compatible, which means they also both have to move. Um, so what a lot of people don't really understand when they're patching um, mortar, doing mortar patches, is that the composition of the mortar is incredibly important. If the mortar is too hard, uh, it will result in bricks breaking or spalling. We'll get into that a little bit, too. And if the mortar is too soft, it's just going to crumble away. So, you know, there are literal classes that we take in school about mortar composition and breaking it down. And there are companies that will you send them a

sample and they tell you exactly what the mortar is made of. um so you can recreate it um and properly repoint your historic building. You've probably also heard us say that buildings need to breathe. All historic buildings, not just masonry, um were made to let moisture in, let the moisture out, and that's through um water vapor going in and out of the building. Not necessarily air. So, we're not talking about a leaky building. We're not talking about air coming through holes and gaps and your windows, but the materials themselves let the let the water in and then they have to have a way to let the water vapor out. So when you mess with the exterior coating of a building, you are interrupting that natural process. Oh my god. Okay. So, who knows what the root of all evil is when it comes to a historic building, any building really?

Water.

Water. That's right. Uh, water is the cause of most issues you see with with buildings, especially brick. Um, cuz like I said, the water comes into the building. It has to find a way out. And so you would think, you know, waterproofing the outside of the building might be a good idea because if water can't get in, then it doesn't need to come out, right? But water will always find a way. Um, that is number one preservation tip there. Water will always find a way. It can come through the roof. It can be absorbed up through the ground, come from interior humidity, who knows? but it it finds a way into the building. Um, and if it gets trapped trying to get out of the brick or the mortar, it's going to cause issues. So, what we see a lot in historic preservation, and we've seen it through the years. Um, learning from past people's mistakes is pretty pretty normal. Um, so there will be some new great material. You want to use it on your building and it's going to make your building waterproof. It's going to make your building stronger. It's going to make it last forever. Um, you saw this a lot in in uh historic buildings when it came to the introduction of Portland cement. So, it was a I mean, it's an old material. Um, they've been using it for quite a while, but it's it's very hard material. Um, and it does not allow for the water flow. So, I've seen um in Charleston, for example, uh someone back in the day, they said, "Oh, this building, this this wall is falling down. We need to make sure it's stronger." So, they pge the exterior, which is just adding kind of a small skim coat of cement to the surface of

the brick. Um, and you know, it's great, whatever. And then 50 years later, what all that's left is that cement, you know, little piece of parched exterior coating and all the brick behind it is crumbled away. Um, so that's that's kind of extreme, but we do see things like that. So you can see here, you know, someone patched a missing brick with cement. It's not it may not be causing issues now. I mean you can see there is some issues but down the road it very well could. Um so that's patching too. Um and then incompatible mortar. So like I said the mortar and the brick have to work together. They both have to expand and contract. Um and like the mortar is the sacrificial element. So when the brick starts moving around the mortal mortar can get out a little bit. I'm doing some Um so so using incompatible mort incompatible mortar is an issue that we see a lot. Um a lot of times it's also really unsightly. So people people can see that issue and be like this is ugly. People are just slapping cement on the building not doing correct pointing. Um, but more than just ugly, it can cause damage because it's it's a different hardness than the brick that it's associated with. Um, waterproofing too. I kind of talked about this. Um, waterproofing and water repellents. I think we've seen too um preservationists are always going to be hesitant when it with any new great technology that's it's going to let the building breathe. it's going to do all the things it needs to do because we've heard those things before and we've

heard the horror stories and we've seen them. Um, so it's best just to let the building function like it's supposed to. Um, and let it breathe as I was saying. Um, even even with a water repellent, it it you don't know. I mean, it may cause like a film on the building. it could end up trapping some of the water in there and it might just be a brick here or there, but that's still an issue. Um, so we see we see all those issues a lot and obviously the big one for us that y'all see a lot is painting brick. Um, which we do not normally recommend. So, these are just some pictures I've taken over the years of of bricks with issues. Um, and it's not necessarily anyone doing anything wrong. Um, sometimes I've seen it where bricks are just not good. They're soft. Um, in this case, there probably have been some mortar uh patches that are not quite compatible with the brick. They trapped water. Um, and so this is called spalling. It's when the outer tough coat that's been fired of the brick crumbles away and then inside the wall it just turns into dust. Um, so you can see there when you see a wall where you just have the mortar outline of where the brick is supposed to go, that's pretty good indication that that mortar is too hard for that brick cuz it's the last thing that's standing and the brick is all gone. Um, so that's that's also pretty extreme example. You don't see that on houses. This was um this is the Bull Street wall. So that's very very very old brick um that you see has completely spalled away. Now that doesn't mean the wall is going to fall

down um but cuz it's a thick wall, but it does need attention and paint. So, um, this again is an old building that's been painted for years and years. Um, the paint is failing in a number of ways related to water. Um, so when paint starts bubbling, flaking, that's all water getting trapped underneath it between, you know, the brick and the paint, it has nowhere to go. So, it just sits in that brick um until the brick just decides to bust out. Um, so you can see here too, um, there's a lot of missing mortar that they also just kind of painted over. Uh, so paint is not a a solution for missing mortar. The bu the bricks still need that mortar for when it moves. Um, so there's a lot of issues going on here, but you can see the brick just crumbles away. And this may have taken I don't know 30 years to happen, but it happened. Um, two, you know, all of what I'm saying today, I'm I'm focusing on brick because that's what we see most, but most of it's pretty applicable to any type of masonry construction. um the issues related to it as far as is it going to crack, is it gonna delaminate, is it going to crumble may be specific to that material. Um so for instance with c certain stones we'll see the delamination where just layers on the outside start peeling off. Um, this here is uh concrete bricks uh that has been painted over and it's hard to tell, but um in touching touching those concrete

bricks, it's just crumbling away um to the touch. So, a lot of moisture's been trapped there over the years and underneath it's starting to crumble. So becomes an issue again maybe after 30 years but it's it's the building's still there and people want to use it. It needs to be in good shape and functioning. So paint removal um it is possible it is possible to remove paint from brick. It is not easy. It is time consuming and the longer the paint has been on the brick pro probably not always but it's going to be harder to get off. Um so if there's you know you see things about in preservation about graffiti on buildings you can normally get that off pretty quickly and once you notice it you know you want that off but the paint that's been sitting there for 20 years may be a little bit harder to get off. Um, so we always say use the gentlest means possible. You might have seen that in our evaluation before. If you're going to clean, if you're going to do this or that, it needs to be the gentlest means possible. That does not mean it's going to be fast. Um, that does not mean it's going to be easy. Uh, a lot of times, you mean anything with a good old building, you have to take your time with it and to do it right. So, um, one thing, you know, preservationists have seen throughout the years, um, early on, I don't I don't even know why you would do this, but the sand blasting, right? Um, completely damaging. I mean, almost any material is going to poke little holes in everything. Um, but with brick especially, you're chipping away at that hard exterior coating that is there for

a reason. It's it's the outside of the brick. It needs to stay intact um to protect the building. So, that was one. I mean, I don't know. I've never seen someone do that, but you have. In your in your experience, in your in your um years of of work, um you've seen it, and I've seen buildings in the aftermath of that. Um, so you know, and and our guidelines normally say, you know, unless it's for protective reasons and things like that, sometimes when you knock off the exterior coat of a brick, it has nothing to protect it. You might have to do something like paint it or, I don't know, pge it, stucco, I don't some other type of treatment because it's just going to keep crumbling and crumbling away. Um, so most most of what we see there are a lot of, like I said, new technologies out there for removing brick. I've heard I've heard tons of stuff. There's like one where it it was like sponges, like little tiny pieces of sponge. It like throws at the brick to get the paint off. Um, but tried and trueue methods uh that we use around here a lot are going to be more chemical. Um, so these can be rolled onto the building, painted onto the building, or or sprayed onto the building. Um, and what we always recommend is doing test panels. So you can see in this image here where they did test panels of four different products with four different results. Um you know and what you see on this building may not necessarily work on another building. Um the the product is going to react to the brick in different ways with different brick and different buildings and conditions. So, you know, it's not like if peel away works here, you're always going to be using that. Not necessarily. You still need to do test panels to see what's going to work best. Um, it's

labor intensive. You have to add layers. Um, most of the time they have a layer of the um it's kind of thick, gooey. Anybody who's ever used it's this, you know, same consistency of what you see with paint removal that you would use on wood. Um, so it's going to stick to the surface and and then stay stay vertical, not just run off. Um, and a lot of times what you'll see is they have to do um kind of what is it? Paper or not paper, but like it's like a film like a Yeah. word. Yeah. It's paper that you lay across. That's

Yeah. So you lay it over it. it it holds it against the building kind of like a a pus and and works at getting that paint off. Um you take that down. Sometimes you have to use a neutralizer because it's, you know, eating away at the paint. You don't want it to keep eating away at the building. Um and see what you get. Um you can use soft brushes to kind of get in. It's not, you know, may may not come all the way off. um in some cases. I'll show you a picture later, but but it um and it may have to be done multiple times. Um and so, you know, a lot of people just want it one done and just be able to get it done quickly. Um but like I said, everything with historic buildings takes a little time, takes a little thought, and sometimes it takes creativity. Um, but we have had a number of prominent buildings in Colombia that were painted for years. I believe this is I don't know what building this is.

It might might be the old Starbucks.

It may be. Yeah, maybe the old Starbucks, which I think is Caba now. Um, that building was painted for years and they were able to take the paint off. It's a beautiful building. Um, more recently, we have the laundry building on the Bull Street District, and I'll show you a picture of that. Um, painted. The paint didn't even look good. It was flaking. Obviously, no one was taking care of that building for a while. But the new owner wanted to take all of that off, be able to show the brick and show how beautiful the building is. Um, and it looks great now. So he he used one of these chemical peels basically um on the building to be able to take the the paint off. So this is the laundry building what I was just talking about. Um looks kind of sad um but obviously had been painted for years. In parts you can see uh mortar loss. You can see where the bricks are kind of a little bit softer coming through the brick color. um through the paint the where the paint is worn off and then today. So, it's not perfect. Um but those of us who love historic buildings don't expect them to be perfect. Uh you know, they have their patina. Um but he the owner of this building probably didn't want it to be perfect just knowing him. Um, you know, they probably could have gone back in with with brushes, a couple more layers in certain places to get that more off. Um, but it shows the history. Um, but it's a beautiful example of of how you can really change the building by removing those later layers. So,

white to the red brick being exposed again. Um, so that's all I have. Amy, did you want to add anything? Okay. Do you have any questions? Yeah, it was uh that was very informative. I appreciate any comments. Got a question.

So, we're considering application requesting a brick and that brick. The most important thing we look for. So, the might look terrible, but that's not most but that exterior layer is probably I guess material.

I mean, yes and no. So, I've seen some some uh buildings where like one brick here and one brick there and one brick there is spalling or missing. Um those can be dug out, a new brick put in with mortar around it. So, in that case, you know, it would be more of a repair piece by piece. I've yet to come across um a building that like the entire outside was compromised. But say for instance a building was sand blasted like I said you know we don't allow that but if someone happened to do it yes there may be need to be some type of protective coating put on that and I will say that um when people come to us with problems like you know uh dampness in the house or something like that and there and a lot of times people do propose the waterproofing the first thing we do is go in and look at the building overall to see where is the water coming in. You know, we we have to sort of be investigators into the building and look at where the possible problems really are. A lot of times they're not actually where people think that they are. So, it just takes like, you know, some experience and some knowledge about how buildings are put together to kind of figure out where those issues might be. So, it's very interesting. Actually,

I have a a quick follow-up question as well. Do you differentiate between brick when it's like um multi-wife when it's structural as well and when there's a air cavity behind it in terms of allowing it to vent? Uh as far as like what we allow for painting,

right? If there's a painting question and um they want to make the case that it's not going to deteriorate the brick because there's an air barrier behind it and there's brick vents. Would you consider that? Um, well, I mean, most of the walls we look at are going to be brick veneer walls, so there is going to be a cavity behind it. Um, but it just goes back to the, you know, PE the brick itself can trap moisture. Um, and so we don't want to compromise that in any way. It needs to come out of the building, not into the building. So, you want it the path out of the building to be clear for any type of water vapor to get out. Charles, did you have to come? show.

Yeah. So, there are a lot of products um and a lot of really good reputable companies that have that have products just for cleaning brick. Um and a lot of times even with the paint removal, you you don't want to use a water pressure that's too hard. I think generally it's 300 PSI or less. So um but there are products specifically for cleaning brick that you can be purchased through different companies. Um

yeah and I mean there there are some that are environmentally friendly, right? Um so but those those companies um we've worked with one before. they actually have a preservationist on staff that can guide you through what's the right product for your building and what substrate do you have and what are the issues that you're seeing and what's the best way to clean that. Um so yeah, there's a lot of products out there. Yeah, we have to when we're looking at buildings and cleaning methods, a lot of times we have to look at the individual um chemicals in, you know, in the spec sheets to figure out exactly what they're using and if it's going to actually damage the building in spite of what people say their products will do. So, yeah. Any other comments or questions? Well, well, thank you staff. That was very interesting. No, thank you.

Yeah. Um, any other business? All issues. Is that it? Okay. All right. Then I'm just looking for a motion to adjurnn. [Music] [Music]