Bricklaying and repointing in Ashley Heath

Repointing brickwork of the seventies and eighties. Half of Ashley Heath was built between the war and the early eighties and the busiest years were the seventies, so most of what we point here is not soft old brick in lime. It is a hard cement mortar on a machine made facing brick, and that fails differently. Rather than washing out, the joint face frets and crazes on the weather side, the perpends open first, and water starts to track in under the cills. It is raked out square to sound mortar and put back in a mix chosen for that brick, struck to match the profile already on the wall so one elevation does not stand out against the next.

Boundary walls, and stacks above a low roof. More than half the dwellings here are bungalows, and a stack on a single storey house is short but fully exposed, taking weather on all four sides with no wall above to shelter it. The mortar around the pots is nearly always the first thing gone, and if that flaunching is cracked then water is running down inside the stack. We repoint the stack, renew the flaunching and rebuild the courses above the roof where frost has got into them, and doing that while roofing access is up is the cheap way to buy it. Plots here are large and the walls between them are long, so boundary work is a bigger part of the job than it would be on an estate. Leaning lengths come down and go back up off a proper footing, gate piers are put back plumb and re-capped, and coping is re-bedded. Where a wall is retaining even a small change in level we build drainage in behind it, because one asked to do a retaining wall's job without it will bow out again.

Wide windows and patio doors are everywhere in this housing, and a long opening puts a lot of load on one lintel. A crack running vertically from the corner of an opening usually means the lintel has dropped or a steel one is corroding, so the opening gets propped, the lintel replaced and the brickwork over it rebuilt, with cracked cills cut out at the same time. New work is cavity construction off a foundation dug to what the ground actually is, and the hard part is the match, because a facing brick from that period can be difficult to source. There is a little older property here and one listed entry, and those solid walls are a lime job.

No rate per square metre: what the joints are like decides the job. Most of what we price here is a detached bungalow in a large plot, a garage or outbuilding behind it, or a long boundary wall between two gardens, and much of that is reachable from a tower. A chimney or a gable wants a scaffold, and how long it stands is why work at height rules make access a priced line. Raking by hand is slow, and joint depth and spalled faces decide the hours. Ask how deep, by hand or disc, what mix, how many bricks, and whether scaffold is in.

We cover Ashley Heath and BH24, across St Leonards and St Ives, out to Ringwood and Three Legged Cross, and up through Verwood and West Moors. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.