Bricklaying in Bere Regis

Soft brick, lime joints, and taking cement back off. On the older brickwork in Bere Regis the joint is meant to be the sacrificial part: water goes in and comes back out through the mortar, and the brick stays sound.

We rake out by hand with a chisel and a hacksaw blade, not a disc, back to sound material, and point in a lime mix such as an NHL 3.5 matched to the existing for colour, sand and strength. On a period wall here, the repair that matters most is taking cement pointing back off. Cement is less permeable than the brick around it, so moisture that used to leave through the joint leaves through the brick face instead, and one hard frost later the faces have blown while the pointing itself is still perfect.

Flint, brick and cob. Boundary walls in Bere Regis take a beating from vehicles on narrow lanes, from ivy, and from water sitting on top where the coping has gone. Flint bedded in lime does not tolerate being pushed, so once a wall is bowed the answer is to take that section down and rebuild it off the same footing with the flint reset. Where a wall is cob with a brick plinth and coping, we look after the brick that protects it, because keeping the top and the base dry is most of what keeps cob standing. The cob itself is a specialist repair and we will say so rather than patch it in something that will do it harm.

Old stacks stand clear of everything and take weather from all sides, so the joints go first and then the flaunching cracks and starts feeding water down inside the stack. On a thatched roof, access has to be planned around the thatch, and that is a conversation before the quote, not after. The twentieth century parts of Bere Regis are ordinary cavity work, and so is most new building in the village.

Brickwork is priced on the joints and the bricks, not the square metres. Depth and method. Joints raked back by hand on soft brick take far longer than a disc on a hard modern face, and a disc would damage an old one. How deep the joints have eroded and how many faces have spalled decide the hours.

The mix. Lime mortar matched to an older wall costs more in time than a cement mix, and it has to be protected from frost and sun while it cures.

Movement. The ground here is a clay that shrinks and swells with the seasons. A crack that opens and closes needs its cause found first, often a leaking gutter or a downpipe discharging at the foot of the wall. Stitching or rebuilding is priced separately from pointing.

Getting to it. A boundary wall along a lane may need the road managed while it is worked on. A gable or chimney needs a scaffold, and the work at height rules are why that is a line on the quote.

Put these questions to any other quote for Bere Regis brickwork. How deep are the joints raked, and by hand or disc? What mix, and has it been matched? Is the scaffold included?

Bere Regis has a lot of listed buildings, and the listing covers the whole of the building, not the interesting bits of the front. It normally reaches the walls and outbuildings inside the curtilage too, so a garden wall or a range across the yard can be protected even though nobody thinks of it that way.

That matters for brickwork because changing the mortar changes the character of the wall: taking out lime and pointing in cement is an alteration, not a repair, and doing it without listed building consent is an offence rather than a technicality. Like for like repair in the same lime mix is normally fine without any application at all.

The practical advice is simple. Find out whether you are listed before you collect quotes, because it changes the mix, the method and the timetable, and a determination on a consent application takes a couple of months, not a couple of weeks.

If consent is needed, a conservation officer will want to know the mix, the sand, the joint profile and how the wall will be raked out, and the easiest way to answer all four is a small sample panel on a quiet elevation. We will build one and put the specification in the quote in the same words the officer needs to see, and we would rather wait for the paperwork than get a wall wrong that has stood for three hundred years.

We are based in Boscombe, 17 miles from Bere Regis, and take brickwork and repointing jobs in the village and across BH20, including Milborne St Andrew, Winterborne Kingston and Wool. Dorset Council is the planning and building control authority for all of them.

The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales under number 15471719. It belongs to Thomas Hannen, and he is the one who looks at the wall and prices the job, rather than a salesman. A verified customer scored us 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. Both the visit and the written quote, broken down line by line, are free. Before you book a visit in Bere Regis, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Bere Regis need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.