Bricklaying and repointing in Walhampton and Portmore

Repointing old, soft brick. 26.9 per cent of the housing here predates 1919 and the peak of it is pre-1900, which means solid walls, handmade brick and a lime mortar that was always meant to be softer than the brick around it. We rake the joints out by hand to roughly twice their width, brush them clean and point back in a matched mix, usually a natural hydraulic lime such as NHL 3.5 on the older walls and a cement based mix on anything post-war with a cavity. The sand comes first, because the sand is what gives a mortar its colour, and the joint goes back to the profile the wall already carries, flush, bucket handle or weather struck. The most exposed elevation faces south west, so that is normally the one that has gone and the one we price. On anything you look at every day we put up a sample panel and let you see it dry before we carry on.

Estate walls, gate piers and copings. Portmore and Walhampton are full of long brick boundary walls, gate piers and outbuilding walls, a lot of it built as one estate and never underpinned by much, with 93 listed entries in the area from the house and school down to the monument and the piers around them. The failures are always the same. The coping has gone or was never right, water gets into the top of the wall, frost breaks the brick faces up and the wall starts bowing. A bowed section is a rebuild off a proper footing rather than something to prop and hope about. Gate piers get taken down and rebuilt with the ironwork tied back in. Where the wall is shared with a neighbour, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 gives them a formal say before anything comes down, and that is far easier served early than argued about later.

Stacks here are exposed on all four sides and often still working, so they are warm inside and soaked outside all winter. The joints above the roof line go first, then the flaunching around the pots cracks and water tracks down the flue into a bedroom ceiling. We repoint the stack, renew the flaunching and reset any pot that has moved, and it is worth doing everything up there in one visit rather than paying for the access twice. Where a brick face has already blown, the wall takes water like a sponge and repointing on its own will not fix it, so we cut out and replace the worst of them, using reclaimed brick where the original has been out of production for a century. A new brick sits proud of the wall visually for a few seasons until weathering brings it in, which is worth knowing before you decide how many to change. New brickwork is the rest: extensions, porches, garden rooms, new piers and opening a wall up with a lintel over it, on a foundation dug to depth with the ground here shrinking and swelling under it. Matching matters more than in most places, because the National Park will look at anything visible.

No rate per square metre. Access first: a cottage on a lane with no verge for a scaffold, a converted house where the platform goes up in shared parking and a paddock wall you can park a mixer beside are three different jobs. How long the platform stands matters as much as its size, and work at height rules are why it is a priced line. On lime work the hours go on raking by hand and on matching, and both want trial panels. Ask how deep the joints are raked, by hand or by disc, and what the mix is.

Just over three in ten dwellings in this area are flats or maisonettes, most of them in converted houses and older buildings that were never built as flats. That matters more on brickwork than on almost any other trade, because the outside of the building, walls and boundary walls included, almost always belongs to the freeholder and is paid for out of the service charge.

If you are a leaseholder looking at eroded joints or a cracked parapet, you generally cannot instruct the work or pay for it yourself, however keen you are to get on with it.

The practical route is short. Tell the managing agent or the freeholder what you can see, ask them to get it looked at, and ask them to have us quote. We are happy to survey and price to an agent, itemised elevation by elevation, which is what a freeholder needs in order to get moving.

Be aware that once the cost per flat passes a statutory threshold the freeholder has to run a Section 20 consultation before the work starts, which adds weeks rather than days to the timetable. That is the single biggest reason repointing on a converted house gets left another winter, and it is why raising it early in the year is worth doing. If you own a freehold house here, none of this applies to you and we can simply book it in.

We cover Walhampton, Portmore, Pilley, South Baddesley, Boldre and the Lymington side of SO41, and the travel is in the quote rather than hidden in a day rate. 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.