Bricklaying in Iwerne Minster

Flint and brick walls. 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. Many homes in Iwerne Minster predate 1919.

A wall of that age 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 hard cement joints. On the old walls in Iwerne Minster this is the repair that matters most. 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, not 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 instead of 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.

We do not work to a rate per square metre on brickwork. Until somebody has looked at the joints, the size of a wall tells you very little.

What the wall is made of. A flint and brick wall is slower to work than plain brickwork, because every flint has to be bedded and the joints are wide and uneven. Soft handmade brick on an older house needs a lime mortar and hand raking. A post-war cavity wall in hard brick takes a cement-based mix and moves along faster.

How far it has gone. Shallow weathering is a rake and repoint. Spalled faces mean bricks cut out and replaced, and a bulging section means taking down and rebuilding. Matching a brick for an older house can mean hunting down reclaimed stock of the right size and colour, and sometimes a trial panel before the rest.

Height and weather. A boundary wall is worked from the ground. A stack needs scaffold, and the work at height rules make that a priced line. Lime also needs time and protection from frost, so a job in the cold months can take longer.

Ask any other quote how deep the joints will be raked and whether by hand or with a grinder, what mix is going in, and whether the scaffold is included.

Iwerne Minster is 20.8 miles north of our base in Boscombe. We take on brick and flint work there and through the valley villages, Iwerne Courtney, Child Okeford and Stourpaine among them, into Blandford and across DT11, where Dorset Council is the planning authority.

You would be dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, company number 15471719, registered in England and Wales. It is Thomas Hannen's company, and he looks at your wall and works out the price himself. You will find a verified 10 out of 10 from a customer on Checkatrade. The site visit and the itemised written quote are free. Before you book a visit in Iwerne Minster, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Iwerne Minster 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.