COMMERCIAL
EXTERIOR BUILDING REPAIR
IN HOUSTON, TX.
Under the city's Code of Ordinances, Houston Special Flood Hazard Areas take in the FEMA 100-year floodplain and the 500-year floodplain alike, which puts the 0.2-percent-annual-chance area in the same category as the more frequent one. Higher up the wall the stock changes character: the 1960 First City National Bank Building set floor-to-ceiling windows behind a concrete exoskeleton, and a building detailed that way carries its structure on the outside. Near grade the question is what standing water has already done; above it, what weather has done to an exposed frame. The scope answers each on its own line.
What Exterior Building Repair Includes
Each scope below is written twice on a Houston building, once for the courses closest to grade and once for the frame and the wall above them.
Structural Concrete Repair
A concrete repair is priced from its boundary, and the boundary is rarely where the damage shows. Griffin locates delamination by sounding and by the pattern of the cracking, records the depth at which the reinforcing sits, and carries removal back to material that will bond. Reinstatement uses a mortar matched to the parent concrete for strength, absorption, and thermal movement, and any removal that reaches the member's capacity goes to the owner's engineer before it is cut.
Houston has a generation of buildings that put the structure outside. The 1960 First City National Bank Building recessed floor-to-ceiling windows behind a concrete exoskeleton, and where a frame is detailed that way it is carrying load and taking weather on one face. A patch on a frame like that answers to an engineer and then gets read from the sidewalk, so the mix, the aggregate, and the form-face texture belong in the repair specification next to the removal depth. We prove all of it at a mockup before quantities are released.
Masonry Wall Repair
Most of a masonry repair is decided before anything is cut. Griffin records unit type, bond pattern, joint width and tooling, and the apparent hardness of the existing mortar at each area of distress, then works out whether the wall is failing on its own account or because something above it keeps putting water into it. Units are then cut out, lintels and shelf angles exposed, cracks stitched, and joints repointed with material specified to move at the wall's rate rather than resist it.
A Certificate of Appropriateness attaches to exterior alteration on a Houston landmark, a protected landmark, or a property inside a city-designated district, and the test is whether the work changes an exterior feature's design, character, texture, or material. Structural masonry repair is largely invisible once it is closed up: a shelf angle, a stitched crack, a rebuilt back-up wythe. We list the concealed items and the visible ones on separate lines, so the concealed half can be scheduled while the rest is still being read.
Cladding Panel Repair
A cladding repair is finished at its edges. Griffin restores the attachment first, whether that is fasteners, clips, a hat channel, or an adhesive bed, repairs whatever the panel was fastened to, and returns the perimeter joints, flashings, and terminations as one detail. Metal composite, EIFS, precast, and GFRC each fail in their own way, and none of them fail only at the face, so a panel is not reset until the wall behind it has been signed off.
Houston's residential-buffering amendments have applied to commercial building-permit applications since February 25, 2023, and they set garage exterior-cover and lighting standards meant to keep headlights and garage lighting off neighboring residences and streets. On a structure that backs onto houses, a damaged screen panel is doing two jobs. We record the existing cover's opening pattern and the fixtures behind it before the replacement is specified, because a more open substitute chosen for availability can turn a repair into a permit question.
Expansion Joint & Penetration Repair
Penetrations outnumber joints on most commercial exteriors and get a fraction of the attention. Griffin inventories both: conduit, pipe sleeves, anchors, vents, and equipment curbs, along with expansion joints, control joints, and the perimeter of every opening, each recorded with the substrate on either side and the movement it has to absorb. Failed nosings and spalled joint edges are rebuilt before any seal goes in, because a sealant is only as straight as the substrate under it.
The city keeps its 500-year floodplain as a dedicated layer on a public flood-hazard map, drawn as the 0.2-percent-annual-chance hazard. For joint and penetration work that layer matters at one height: the sleeves, thresholds, and slab-to-wall joints within a few feet of the sidewalk, where a seal may be asked to hold against standing water rather than wind-driven rain. Those are specified for the way they will be loaded, and the same detail higher up the elevation is specified for movement.
Industries We Serve in Houston
From the Mapped Flood Line to the Parapet, a Houston Elevation Is Three Repairs
Water that stands against a wall does something different from water that runs down it. It comes in at the bottom, moves up through the base course by absorption, carries silt and dissolved salts into the masonry and leaves them there as it dries, and the reinforcing closest to grade corrodes first because it stays wet longest. Under Houston's Code of Ordinances, Houston Special Flood Hazard Areas take in the FEMA 100-year and 500-year floodplains together, so the city's own definition reaches well past the ground that floods often. The first thing we establish here is how high the staining, the efflorescence, and the hollow-sounding material actually run. That height is the boundary of the repair, not the spall that announced it.
The map itself is the cheap part. Houston publishes a dedicated FEMA 500-year floodplain layer on its public flood-hazard map, representing the 0.2-percent-annual-chance hazard, so a parcel can be screened against it before anyone writes the details at grade. What changes on a mapped parcel is short and specific: what goes back into the lowest courses, whether a door or louver opening at the sidewalk is rebuilt to the detail it had, how the threshold and the slab-to-wall joint are sealed, and where the paving sends water once it leaves the building. Those items carry their own quantities on our scope, because they are the ones a property team gets asked about after the next storm.
Above that zone a Houston elevation stops being one repair. The 1960 First City National Bank Building set its floor-to-ceiling windows behind a concrete exoskeleton, the 1956 Bank of the Southwest Building carried the city's first aluminum curtain wall. Where the frame is the elevation, the structural repair and the weather barrier are the same surface, and a patch is an appearance decision as much as an engineering one. On the older masonry blocks the wall is thick, water arrives through joints and copings, and the repair is a matching problem. One property can hand a manager both, which is why an elevation gets quantified in bands.
About half the district predates 1901 and the rest was built by 1935, and masonry that old is repaired by rebuilding in units and mortar rather than by fastening something back on.
Designation is common enough across Houston's commercial stock that a repair scope is written expecting a reviewer to read part of it.
A capital program of that size fixes access, closures, and the order of work years ahead, which is the planning horizon exterior repair on a large campus actually needs.
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Exterior Building Repair FAQ — Houston, TX
Our property sits inside a mapped Houston flood area. Does that change an exterior repair scope?
The change is concentrated at the bottom of the wall and barely reaches the rest of it. Houston Special Flood Hazard Areas take in both the FEMA 100-year and the 500-year floodplains under the city's Code of Ordinances, and the city keeps the 500-year floodplain as its own layer on a public flood-hazard map, so a parcel can be screened in minutes. On a mapped property we survey the lowest part of the wall as its own piece of work: probe above the visible damage, record how high staining and hollow material run, look at the reinforcing nearest grade rather than at the spall that announced the problem, and check how the paving sheds water at the building. The repair details that follow, from the base course units to the thresholds and slab-to-wall joints, carry their own quantities. The assembly at grade has a different service history from the assembly two floors up, whether or not the building has ever flooded, and the survey has to record that separately before anything is priced.
Water is reaching the top floor of our 1960s building. Where does that usually start?
On that generation, at a metal-to-glass perimeter or at the line where a flat roof turns up into the wall. The city's landmark record describes its International Style stock with the same short material list each time: concrete, steel beams, plate glass, slab doors, metal window frames, flat roofs, and on the low-rise examples a horizontal band of windows. Every one of those is a junction between materials that move at different rates, sealed with products that have since taken decades of heat. We work down from the parapet, through coping joints and their splices, the roof-to-wall termination, then the head, jamb, and sill perimeters of the glazing band, with water testing wherever the path is not obvious from the staining inside. The structural part of that scope is often small, an embed or a lintel end that began to corrode where the joint let go, but it has to be found before anything is sealed over it.
Our engineer calls this a structural repair and our architect calls it facade work. Which are we buying?
Look at what the finding is made of. Exterior building repair is what you buy when the finding is lost section: a corroded lintel bearing, a delaminated back-up wall, a column face that has opened, a shelf angle that has swelled and lifted the course above it. Those are priced by the member, against a threshold the owner's engineer sets, and they close out when the member is sound again. A facade program is what you buy when the finding is that the wall's water path no longer works end to end, from coping to sill to the head of an opening, however minor any single item on that list looks by itself. The test we use in Houston is to ask what the water did rather than what the finish shows: a chalked and patched elevation can sit on sound structure, and a clean one can hide a bearing with very little left. Our assessment reports both readings and says which one the evidence supports. Most buildings buy some of each, with the structure first.
Where do your crews work from, and what does the job take out of service?
From the perimeter, on 56-foot and 72-foot boom trucks, for most of an exterior scope. That keeps the crew out of tenant space and puts the hard part on the ground: the drop zone, the lift footprint and its swing, the loading area, and the pedestrian protection under the work. Houston's off-street parking ordinance requires new developments and redeveloped buildings or tracts to provide sufficient parking and loading facilities while they are occupied or in use, so on a redeveloped property the spaces a lift stands in are usually counted against something already. We walk the site with the property team, fix the staging areas and the order they move in, and price a different access method where a count or a dock cannot be given up. Those positions go into the written plan before mobilization rather than into a conversation on the first morning.
We manage a campus rather than one building. How does exterior repair get scoped across it?
A campus is assessed on one mobilization, with the structures ranked against one another instead of one at a time. Houston's own capital planning is a fair model: in September 2026 the city approved $129.9 million in initial airport-system funding inside a seven-project, $229.9 million infrastructure program at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, covering an 8,100-space employee parking lot, a 3,000-square-foot administration building, ecopark canopies, Terminal C pedestrian-bridge repairs, and expanded detention at Reinhardt Bayou, Garners Bayou, and Turkey Creek. Buildings, parking, pedestrian connections, and stormwater capacity went into one program because they share access, users, and water. A private campus behaves the same way. We assess every structure on one visit, rank findings across all of them by hazard and by what is deteriorating fastest, and phase the work so one access setup and one set of closures serve more than a single building.
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Related Services
On most Houston properties the exterior repair scope arrives with at least one of these attached.
Commercial Facade Restoration
Exterior repair answers what a member has lost. Facade work answers how the whole wall sheds water and what it looks like when the access comes down, and on a designated Houston property that second half is the part a reviewer reads.
Review this service →Commercial Waterproofing
Below-grade walls, elevator pits, and plaza decks are where Houston's mapped flood exposure gets argued, and they are covered by membrane rather than patched. Griffin schedules that work with the structural repair so two crews are not detailing the same corner twice.
Explore this service →Parking Garage Repair
A Houston garage carries two exterior problems at once: decks, beams, and connections that need concrete work, and an exterior cover that may sit under the city's residential-buffering standards. Both get assessed on the visit that covers the building.
Learn more →Protect Your Houston Property
We mobilize to Houston for exterior building repair on parcels inside the mapped flood hazard areas, on mid-century buildings whose concrete frame is the elevation, and on garage structures whose exterior cover faces a residential street. Griffin Restoration Inc. quantifies the grade-level work separately from everything above it.