Bricklaying and repointing in Fordingbridge

The older streets. The frontages in the middle of town are solid brick with no cavity, often in Flemish bond, and a lot of the brick is soft and handmade. The joints come out by hand with a hacking iron and a plugging chisel. A grinder on brick like that takes the arris off and there is no putting it back. We rake to about twice the width of the joint, damp the wall and fill in lifts with NHL 3.5 lime and a sharp sand, kept weaker than the brick. The joint goes back flush or slightly recessed, because a proud joint on soft brick sheds the water onto the face.

Sweatfords Water runs through the town with the Avon alongside it, and walls on the low ground stay wet at the base for months. That shows as salts drying out white, soft crumbling mortar and frost spalling the brick faces in the bottom courses. Blown bricks are cut out and replaced with reclaimed brick of the same size, pointed in something soft. What we will not do is render a cement skirt round the base to tidy it up, which traps the water and moves the damage further up the wall.

Tall stacks on the older terraces take weather from every side, so the flaunching cracks, the pots work loose and the joints go long before anything else. Repointing above the roof line off a scaffold covers most of it, and where the top courses have gone soft they come off and go back. Yard walls, walls along the river paths and anything holding a level change need weep holes and drainage behind them, or the water finds the joints instead. Copings go back brick-on-edge with a weathering, and gate piers are rebuilt plumb off their footing.

The estates. Four in ten homes here went up between 1945 and 1982, cavity built with a blockwork inner leaf, a facing brick outer skin in stretcher bond and mild steel wall ties. Horizontal cracking repeating at regular courses is tie failure, and it is repaired with replacement ties resin fixed through the outer leaf. Then it is lintels, garage openings, porches and extensions, with the new brick shown to you as a sample panel before an elevation goes up. Bowed fronts and stepped cracking at a corner take helical stitching, or cutting out and rebuilding off a sound foundation. Where the cause is the ground rather than the brickwork, that wants a structural engineer before anybody quotes, and we will say so rather than sell you pointing.

No rate per square metre: the metre of wall tells you nothing until you see the joints. A frontage straight onto the pavement, a stack on a terrace and a garden wall behind the house each want a different platform. How long the platform stands matters as much as its size, and the work at height rules are why it is a priced line. Raking by hand is slow, so joint depth and spalled faces decide the hours, and matching a mortar or sourcing a brick takes trial panels. Ask how deep joints are raked, by hand or disc, and whether the scaffold is in.

We cover Fordingbridge, Sandleheath, Alderholt, Breamore, Rockbourne and the SP6 addresses along the Avon, with New Forest District Council for planning and building control. 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.