Washington County Courthouse

The clock tower on the Washington County Courthouse is the landmark of downtown Washington, Iowa, and the hardest part of the building to reach. It's also a good example of something we tell owners all the time: masonry maintenance costs a lot less when you stay on top of it.

We last worked on this tower more than ten years ago: spot tuckpointing, new sealant, cleaning, and a water repellent. We've handled a few smaller jobs for the County since. When the County's buildings and grounds staff spotted vegetation growing out of mortar joints high on the tower, they knew it was time to go back up. A plant in a joint means the mortar has opened far enough to hold soil and water, and every freeze after that opens it a little more.

We walked the building with the County in January, priced the work against money they had already set aside in that year's budget, and did the work in the spring of 2026, ahead of our summer school season and sequenced so the courthouse stayed open throughout.

On the clock tower above the roofline, the work was a full maintenance cycle:

• Cleaning. Low-pressure hot water and a biological cleaner to remove the growth and atmospheric soiling without damaging the stone.
• Spot tuckpointing. About 345 square feet of open and failed joints, raked out and repointed with Type O mortar matched to the existing color and tooling.
• Sealant replacement. Roughly 668 linear feet of stone joints cut out and replaced with new backer rod and Sikaflex 15LM.
• Brick and stone repair. 37 deteriorated brick replaced, and six stone patches matched to the surrounding stone in color, texture and profile. Look for them in the finished photos and you won't find them. That's the point of a good patch.
• Water repellent. A breathable, penetrating water repellent over about 2,100 square feet of masonry.

At the base of the building we tuckpointed another 175 square feet of the stone foundation and made 19 stone patches.

Sealant is the weak spot on a tower like this. It has a working life of about ten years, and once it lets go, water goes straight into the wall behind it. So the right plan for this building is a ten-year cycle: replace the sealant, point whatever joints have opened since the last round, clean it, and put the repellent back on. None of that is dramatic, and that's the point. Done on schedule, it keeps the tower out of the kind of restoration that means rebuilt masonry and a budget line nobody planned for.

With this round complete, the County should be looking at ten years or more before the tower needs attention again.

Here's how the County saw it: read Aaron W.'s Google review of the project.

This is the everyday core of our work on government buildings across Iowa: tuckpointing, sealant replacement, water repellent application and historic preservation. If you're not sure where your own building is in its cycle, here's what to look for.