Bricks ?n? Stones Build Masonry Business

Jerry Jones, a salesman with Acme Brick’s Springdale office, which serves all of Northwest Arkansas, didn’t stonewall us. He said the brick business is brisk.

Acme Brick Co., based in Fort Worth, Texas, sold between 15 percent and 20 percent more brick in 2005 through the local office than it has in the last several years, he said.

It can cost between 60 cents and $1 per brick for installation, Jones said. And construction of an average home in this region requires between 10,000 and 14,000 bricks. That’s a cost of $6,000 at the low end to $14,000 at the high end, just for the masonry crew’s expertise and labor, not the actual bricks.

Jones said commercial projects and residential projects seem to cycle in the Northwest Arkansas market.

“Commercial is up,” he said. “It’s just a good market right now.”

Nationwide, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2001, masonry and stone contractors accounted for about 178,820 employees with a payroll of about $5.6 billion.

There were a total of 23,630 firms in the report, and those with one to four employees made up the largest part of those — 11,724 total, or about one third.

BizStats.com, a tracker of small business statistics, reported masonry, tile and drywall contractors took in about $11.9 billion in 2003, up about 5 percent from $11.3 billion in 2002.

As for area stone contractors, Arkansas native stone on homes and as landscaping options are in favor with builders because people like the look.

David Wyckoff, owner of Wyckoff Masonry of Prairie Grove, said he prefers to work with stone rather than brick because it presents a constant challenge of fitting puzzle pieces together with size, type of stone and color.

Wyckoff buys stone from several area dealers and occasionally treks out into the wild to find just the right rock.

Material costs have increased slightly in the last couple of years, he said, mostly due to fuel costs.

Wyckoff tries to specialize when possible. He does between 15 and 20 projects a year, and grossed about $150,000 in 2005, he said.

He recently completed a restoration project on Lafayette Street in Fayetteville. It was a 70- to 80-year-old rock retaining wall 5 feet tall and about 65 feet long. He took the wall apart stone-by-stone, numbered each rock, chiseled off old mortar and rebuilt the wall. He had to replace some of the stones. He got replacements from a quarry in Prairie Grove that he believed to be the quarry where the originals came from. The average weight of each stone was about 100 pounds and some weighed as much as 300 pounds.

The entire project took a little more than three weeks to complete and it was the only project he worked on during that time.

Of course, he said his hands and lower back hurt a lot of the time, but he’s strong and he likes the reward of seeing a project completed.

As for craftsmanship, Wyckoff has done repair jobs on virtually brand new homes and restoration projects that were hard to take apart to restore.

“You definitely get what you pay for,” he said.