Bricklaying in Holt
Repointing, brick repairs, outbuildings, boundary walls and new brickwork around Holt. We find out what the wall is built of before we price it.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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Two houses next door to each other in Holt can need two completely different mortars. Get that wrong and the pointing takes the brick with it, so the first thing we do is find out what the wall is actually built of.
Out in Holt the trouble is rarely at the front of the house. It is an outbuilding whose gable has started to lean. A run of wall beside the lane that has lost half its joints and a few bricks with them. A stack you can see daylight through from the garden. Or somebody has bought a place with a yard of brick buildings and wants to know which of them are worth saving.
Those are all jobs where the answer depends on the footing and the mortar, not on how the wall looks, so we come out and dig a bit, scrape a joint, and check what is holding it up. Then you get a written itemised price with the work broken down, so you can do it in the order that makes sense rather than all at once.
The work
What goes wrong with brickwork in Holt
Outbuildings, barns and old yard walls. There is a lot of working brickwork around Holt that was never built to house standard: single skin outbuildings, stores, old stable ranges and yard walls, put up on very little foundation.
At the bottom the brick has been drawing water out of the ground for a century, so the base courses blow. At the top the coping has gone and water runs straight into the wall head. Rebuilding a gable, taking a wall down to a sound course or putting a proper coping on it are the jobs that stop the rest going.
Long runs of wall along the lanes take everything: a wing mirror, a delivery lorry, tree roots lifting from one side and a bank pushing from the other. A wall bowed past a certain point cannot be pushed back. It comes down, the bricks worth keeping are cleaned off, and it goes back up off a new footing with a dpc, in the same bond, with piers and a coping bedded to shed water. Where a gate pier has dropped it is the foundation under it rather than the pier, and this ground shrinks and swells, so where rainwater goes beside that footing is structural, not just damp.
Telling the two kinds of wall apart. An old cottage here is likely to be solid wall in soft brick, and it wants NHL lime and sharp sand with no cement in it, so the wall dries through the joint. The newer houses along the same lane are cavity in a gauged sand and cement mortar, matched to what is there. Point a period wall in that mix and the moisture leaves through the brick and the faces spall. Stepped cracking from a corner means the ground has moved, horizontal cracking every few courses means wall ties, a straight crack over a wide window means the lintel, and we say which we think it is.
How it runs
Brick repairs around Holt: walls, stacks and outbuildings
Start to finish, you deal with one company. Thomas comes out first to see what is wrong and why: the state of the mortar, cracked or spalled bricks, the chimney, any garden or boundary wall, and where rain runs off the roof and across the ground. The quote you get separates access, raking out, the mortar mix, the area of each wall face, replacement bricks and removal of rubble.
Garden walls and outbuildings are usually built or repaired from the ground or a small tower. A chimney stack takes a scaffold. On a lane with no pavement, we agree before starting where materials are dropped and stacked so the lane stays passable, and a tower on soft ground goes on boards.
Splashes of mortar are washed off before they harden, the work area is swept daily and the rubble leaves with us. A rotten lintel, or a crack running deeper than it looked, is photographed and priced before we carry on.
Repointing in the same materials is repair. A new opening, a lintel or taking out a load bearing wall is building control work with Dorset Council. Holt has listed buildings, and listed building consent is needed before a joint on one is raked, including garden walls and outbuildings within the curtilage. There is no conservation area in the village. A shared wall brings in the Party Wall etc. Act, and other permissions you may require is worth reading before anything new.
Cost
Soft bricks, clay ground and cracked walls: the cost drivers
A square metre of wall tells you nothing until someone has looked at the joints, so we do not quote that way.
Why it cracked. Holt sits on clay, which shrinks when summers are dry and heaves back when winters are wet. A stepped crack beside a downpipe, a drain or a big tree may be the ground moving, not the brickwork failing. Rebuilding without sorting where the water goes means doing it twice, and Approved Document H deals with getting that water well clear of the foundation.
The joints and the mortar. How deep the joints need raking and whether the faces have spalled sets the hours. Older soft bricks want a lime mortar; a hard cement mix traps water and the faces blow off in frost.
Matching. Sourcing a brick to match an older wall, often reclaimed, and mixing trial panels for the mortar colour takes time.
Getting up there. A stack on a two storey house needs a scaffold; an outbuilding may take a tower. The longer a platform stays up, the more it costs, and under the work at height rules it is costed separately.
Ask what depth the joints will be raked to, and whether by hand or with a grinder, which mortar is proposed, and whether anyone has asked why the wall cracked.
If something has moved
A wall leaning towards the lane, or a cracked chimney
A garden wall leaning out over the lane or a path could come down on someone. Keep cars and people back, and stand a bin or some tape in front of it so it is seen after dark.
If bricks have dropped off a chimney, keep away from that side of the house. Photograph any crack and pencil a mark at each end, so you can tell whether it grows. On the first visit we take down or shore up whatever might fall, then look at the cause before pricing the rest. Leaning walls and loose chimneys are a phone call, not a form, and if nobody answers, we ring back as soon as we can. Planned brickwork is Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Worth knowing
Green Belt changes nothing about a repair, and a lot about a new wall
Holt sits in the Green Belt, and that trips people up in one direction only. It has no bearing at all on repair. Repointing, cutting out spalled brick, taking a leaning wall down and rebuilding it on the same line, to the same height, in the same materials, is maintenance rather than development, and nobody needs to apply for anything. If a builder tells you a repointing job here needs permission, that is wrong.
Where it does bite is anything new or anything bigger. Green Belt policy is tighter than most places on new buildings and on adding footprint, so a garden room, a workshop or an extension is a planning question before it is a bricklaying question, and the answer is worth having before you pay anyone to draw it. Walls have their own rules on top of that.
As a general limit a new wall can go up to two metres, dropping to one metre where it runs alongside a road used by vehicles, which is exactly the situation for most frontages along the lanes in Holt. Planning Portal guidance on fences, gates and garden walls sets out where those limits sit. So if you want the wall back taller than it was, ask first. If you want it back as it stands, we can just build it.
Who you are dealing with
Holt, Broom Hill and Mannington: who you are hiring
Brickwork in Holt, Broom Hill, Mannington, Furzehill, Colehill and out to Three Legged Cross is all Dorset Council territory, and Holt lies 8.6 miles from our Boscombe base. Thomas Hannen is the owner, and the bricklayer who looks at your wall and works out the price.
Our Checkatrade listing has one verified customer's 10 out of 10, which you can read for yourself. You are not charged for the visit or for the itemised quote on paper. The company: Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Holt, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Holt?
Most repairs in Holt 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.
| Question | In Holt |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Holt. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Holt, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Holt. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Holt. |
Questions
Questions about bricklaying in Holt
Why does our wall only fail near the ground?
Because that is where the water lingers. Around Holt the ground is cohesive with impeded drainage, so rain running off a hard surface or out of a downpipe soaks away slowly and keeps the base of a wall wet for days after it has stopped. Salts travel up through the joint, crystallise behind the face and turn the mortar to sand. Dropping the ground level and taking the water elsewhere usually matters more than the pointing that goes back in.
Do we need building control to knock through externally?
For a new or widened opening in a load bearing wall, yes. Dorset Council building control wants to see the beam and its bearings, and that notice goes in before the wall is cut, not after somebody spots the steel. Repointing, rebuilding a garden wall on its existing line and swapping out spalled bricks are all repair and sit outside it. If yours is one of the 13 listed entries in the Holt area, consent is separate and comes first.
Does radon here affect building a garden room?
It affects a conversion or a new room, not a repair. Holt falls in a band where roughly 3 to 5 per cent of properties sit above the action level, so basic radon protection is designed into new habitable floors, normally a membrane with a sealed perimeter. Repointing, rebuilding a wall or replacing a lintel does not engage it at all. Tell us at the survey if an outbuilding is becoming a room somebody works or sleeps in, so the floor is detailed properly.
Can we rebuild the old wall exactly as it stands?
If it is coming down anyway, putting it back on the same line at the same height is repair, not development. Sound bricks come off, get cleaned and go back with the weathered faces outwards so the finished wall does not shout new. The footing is the part worth spending on around Holt, because seasonal swelling and shrinking is what leans a wall built off nothing. Dorset Council only gets involved if you go higher or closer to the highway.
Do you clear the old brick and rubble away?
It leaves with us. A rebuilt wall on a Holt plot throws up more spoil than owners expect, mostly broken brick and spent mortar, and that gets bagged or skipped and taken off rather than heaped behind a shed. Anything sound is set aside first for reuse in the same wall. Access out here is often a narrow side gate, so the barrow route is agreed and sheeted before the first course comes down.
Nearby, and next door
Bricklaying near Holt
Nearby places we also cover for bricklaying, with straight-line distances from Holt, and the other trades we offer in Holt itself.
Bricklaying nearby
Our other trades in Holt
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Free quote
Get a price for your brickwork in Holt
Tell us the address and what has started moving. We will come out, scrape a joint and put an itemised price in writing. Free site visit, no obligation.