Bricklaying and repointing in Iwerne Minster

Repointing flint and brick. A good deal of the older village is flint and greensand rubble with brick dressings round the openings and brick quoins at the corners, and there is banded flint and brick on plenty of it. Nearly four in ten homes here predate 1919. That wall went up in lime and it has to stay in lime. We rake the joints out by hand to roughly twice their width, wet them out, and point back in an NHL lime gauged with a sand matched to what is already there. On flintwork the finish is normally a slightly recessed flush joint, sometimes galleted with small chips pressed into the mortar the way the original was done. We make up a sample panel first and leave it a few days, because lime lightens as it dries.

Undoing a cement repoint. This is the most common job we do in the village. A solid wall is breathable by design, and hard cement stops water leaving through the joint, so it leaves through the brick or the flint instead and takes the face off at the first hard frost. Once spalling has started we cut out the worst bricks, replace them with reclaimed or handmade stock of the same size, and take the pointing back to lime so the joint does the suffering again. Stacks up here are exposed on every side and usually fail first: re-flaunching, repointing, cutting out spalled brick and rebedding the pots. Where a stack has real movement we rebuild from the last sound course rather than point over it.

Flint and brick walls run along the lanes and the driveways, with brick piers, half round or saddleback coping and a gate pier at the entrance. They almost always fail from the top down: once the coping lets water into the core the wall bows, then the piers move. Rebuilding a bowed section back onto its own footing and getting the coping properly bedded is usually a day or two. If you are putting up a new wall rather than repairing an old one, Planning Portal guidance on garden walls sets out the height you can go to without planning permission, and if it sits on the line with next door then the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 applies. Extensions, garages and rebuilt gables are cavity work: blockwork inner leaf, facing brick outer leaf, ties at the right centres and a damp proof course you can see. Cutting a new lintel into an existing wall, or rebuilding a brick arch over an old window, is building control work rather than maintenance, and we say so before we quote rather than after.

No rate per square metre: the metre of wall tells you nothing until you see the joints. A flint boundary wall you work off the ground, a village semi with a brick gable and a stack on a detached house all differ. 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 work through Iwerne Minster and the villages up and down the valley, Iwerne Courtney, Fontmell Magna, Child Okeford, Stourpaine and into Blandford, and across DT11 generally. 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.