Bricklaying and repointing in Bournemouth

Repointing an inter war house. A fifth of the housing around Winton and Charminster is inter war, and the mortar on a 1930s wall was mixed to be softer than the brick, so it is meant to wear and after ninety odd winters on the weather side it has. We rake out to about twice the joint width, by hand where the brick is soft enough that a disc would damage the arrises, and point back in a mix matched to the original for sand, colour and strength, finished to the profile the wall already has, which on this stock is usually weather struck or bucket handle rather than flush. A gable and a chimney together are days rather than weeks.

Bays, ties and blown faces. The bay is the part of one of these houses that gets everything: rain off a small flat roof, a gutter that overflows onto it, and a structure carried on brick piers and a lintel with very little to spare. Cracked joints where the bay meets the main wall, a dropped lintel over the bay window and spalling brick at the corners are all common here. Wall ties are the job people misread most often. Steel that corrodes expands and lifts the joint above it, so you get regular horizontal cracking at roughly every sixth course, worst on the elevation that takes the weather, and it is repaired by fitting new stainless ties through the wall and making the joints good rather than the rebuild people fear when they first see it. Blown faces cluster below sills, behind downpipes and in the courses above the damp proof course where a drive or a patio has been laid up against the house.

Half the dwellings here are flats, a lot of them in converted houses, and their large stacks often serve nothing at all now but still take weather from every side, so the joints and the flaunching go and the water they let in comes out on a top floor wall. Repointing a stack, renewing flaunching or taking one down below the roof line wants proper access, usually a scaffold rather than a tower, and it is worth doing all of it in one visit. We are close enough to the sea here that a fixing into an outside wall goes in stainless rather than galvanised. Walls onto the pavement take knocks from cars and push from street tree roots, and where one is shared with next door the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 gives your neighbour a say that is better sorted before the job than during it.

No rate per square metre. The joints decide this job, not the area. A converted villa where the scaffold has to go up beside a shared drive, a semi with a side path a barrow just fits down, and a front garden wall on a busy pavement 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, and whether scaffold is in.

We are a couple of miles from the sea here, and the air carries salt a good deal further inland than that. Salt does two things to brickwork. It holds moisture, so a wall that catches the wind off the coast stays damp between showers instead of drying properly, and salts crystallise just under the surface of a brick and push the face off. Then there is the metal.

Cavity wall ties, the steel over a bay window, old iron cramps and the stubs of railings cut off a garden wall all corrode faster in this air than they would ten miles inland, and corroding metal grows and lifts the brickwork around it. That is why so much of the cracking we are called to on the seaward side of a house is horizontal and regular rather than diagonal.

What it changes for you is the specification, not the price of a bag of sand. On an exposed elevation we use stainless steel for anything going back into the wall, we point in a mix that is not stronger than the brick so salts and moisture can still get out, and we choose a replacement brick that is fired hard enough for a wet, exposed face rather than whatever is on the shelf.

The one thing worth resisting is the urge to seal the wall with a water repellent or a hard render, which traps salt behind the surface and takes the faces off in a couple of winters. If you are comparing quotes for a wall that faces the sea, ask what the ties are made of and what the mortar mix is. Those two answers tell you more than the total does.

We cover Charminster, Winton, Moordown, Queen's Park, Springbourne and the rest of BH8, and we are usually a few minutes away rather than a drive. 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.