Bricklaying and repointing in Crossways

Walls, piers and retaining walls. Estate plots here are divided by long low brick walls, and driveways are flanked by piers that were built to hold a gate and often never got one. Most were laid off a shallow footing with no damp proof course, so they draw water out of the ground, the bottom courses go soft and the wall leans, and on ground that shrinks and swells the movement is seasonal as well. We rebuild bowed lengths on a proper foundation, put a DPC in, reset the coping so water is thrown clear, and rebuild gate piers bonded into the wall instead of standing on their own. Where a wall is retaining ground between two levels it gets built as a retaining wall, with drainage behind it, rather than as a garden wall that happens to have soil against one side.

One elevation, not four. Plenty of Crossways houses are only thirty or forty years old and already want pointing on one elevation, which surprises people. It is normal: the gable that faces the weather is worn out long before the sheltered walls. We rake back to sound mortar, match the mix and the sand for colour, and finish the joint bucket handle or weather struck to match what is already on the house rather than cut flush because it is quicker. Wide garage openings, patio doors and picture windows of this age sit on steel lintels, and a corroding lintel expands and cracks the brickwork it carries: prop, cut out, replace and rebuild over it. That is structural and goes through building control. On the older half of the village the ties are galvanised and worth a look, since corroding ties show as fine horizontal cracking at regular intervals and remedial ties go in from outside without taking the skin down.

Around the edges of the village there are properties that predate all of this, solid wall construction with no cavity behind them, and those get lime rather than cement: an NHL mortar, raked by hand, kept breathable, with a sample panel to look at first. Putting a hard modern mix on soft period brick is what causes the spalling faces on so many walls repointed decades ago. Stacks lose their flaunching and top courses first and are rebuilt off a scaffold. New work means extension skins, porches and garden walls, where the job is matching a facing brick that is often no longer made: reclaimed stock, a sample brick off the wall, and you see what we have found before it is laid.

No rate per square metre: the metre of wall tells you nothing until you know what the joints are like. A house on an open estate frontage, a terrace with a shared rear path and a bungalow tight against next door's fence are three different set ups. The platform is a priced line rather than a favour, under work at height rules. Depth of rake and the state of the brick faces decide the hours, not the square metres. Two quotes for the same wall are usually two different jobs, so ask what is in each.

Crossways is about twenty miles west of the yard, so we work the DT2 villages in planned runs and take in Moreton, Woodsford, Owermoigne and Broadmayne on the same trip. 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.