Bricklaying and repointing in Bearwood

Repointing, in the places it goes first. There is nothing pre-1919 in Bearwood and a third of it went up in the eighties, so the wall you have is a cavity wall with a cement mix in a shallow joint, and it does not fail evenly. The gable that catches the weather goes first, then the course under a gutter that has been overflowing for a couple of winters, then the chimney above the roof line. We rake out to roughly twice the joint width, by hand where a disc would bruise the brick, and point back in a matched mix finished to the profile already on the wall, usually a bucket handle here rather than flush or weather struck. Patching one elevation of a semi is days, not weeks.

Movement in a long run of houses. Nearly three in ten dwellings here are terraced, and a run of linked houses moves with the seasons. Where nothing was built in to let it, the crack turns up in the same places: stepping up through the joints from the corner of an opening, straight down the line where two houses meet, or at the junction between the house and a garage built off a shallower footing. We cut out and rebuild the damaged brickwork, and where the crack is on the line of a shared wall, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 decides how it gets handled with next door before anything starts. The ground here shrinks and swells, so where the rainwater off a roof ends up beside a footing is a structural question and not only a damp one.

Over the openings on this stock you have a concrete or steel lintel, and when the bearing at one end has gone the crack above it is the symptom rather than the fault. Corroding cavity ties show as a horizontal line of lifted joints on the most exposed elevation. A brick kept wet by a leaking downpipe, or by ground raised above the damp proof course, loses its face to the first hard frost and then takes water like a sponge, so those are cut out and replaced one at a time. Matching an eighties facing is the awkward part because a lot of them are out of production, and a reclaimed brick or a careful blend usually looks better than the nearest new one. The estate is stitched together with footpaths, so there are a lot of low walls, piers and planters taking knocks from cars and push from hedge roots, and half a brick thick with no pier every few metres is a wall that will lean eventually.

No rate per square metre. Until you have seen the joints the area means nothing. A mid terrace where every barrow goes round the block, a link detached with a garage tight to next door, and a front boundary wall you can park alongside are three different jobs before a brick is touched. 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.

The ground under this part of town is cohesive and it shrinks and swells with the seasons. In a dry summer it pulls away and settles, in a wet winter it takes water up and pushes back, and anything sat on a shallow footing goes along for the ride.

That is why the cracking we see in Bearwood is so often in the porch, the conservatory dwarf wall, the garage return or the garden wall rather than in the house itself: the house is on a deeper foundation and the add ons usually are not. A crack that opens in August and closes by February is telling you about the ground, not the brickwork, and pointing it up in summer just means it opens somewhere else.

The practical thing you can do about it is control where rainwater ends up. A downpipe running into a gully that has cracked, a soakaway put in too close to the house, or a drive that falls back towards the wall all keep one patch of ground wet while the rest dries out, and that difference is what moves a footing. Approved Document H is the standard for getting surface water away properly, and it is worth sorting before you pay anyone to repair a wall it is undermining.

Where we are rebuilding on this ground we dig deeper than the old footing, keep new planting away from it, and tell you honestly if the sensible answer is to watch the crack for a year first.

We cover Bearwood, Kinson, Merley, Canford Magna, Wallisdown and the rest of BH11, and we are a short run from most of it. 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.