Bricklaying in Walhampton and Portmore

Much of the brick is old and soft. 26.9 per cent of the housing in Walhampton and Portmore 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 listings running from the house and school down to the monument and the gate 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 instead of 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.

Brickwork cannot honestly be priced per square metre, because two walls the same size can need entirely different work. Access. A cottage on a lane without a verge, a converted house with the scaffold in a shared car park, and a garden or paddock wall you can back a mixer up to are three different set ups.

How long the scaffold stays up matters as much as how big it is, and under the work at height rules it is a priced line.

Soft brick and lime. On pre-war walls the joints are raked by hand and refilled with lime mortar, a slower material than cement. Matching colour and texture means trial panels, and handmade or reclaimed bricks have to be found to suit.

Why it moved. Some of the ground here is clay, which shrinks in a dry summer and swells in a wet winter. A crack caused by that is about drainage and foundations as much as mortar, and we will tell you if a structural engineer should see it before a bricklayer does.

Taking down and rebuilding. A leaning section has to be dismantled carefully, with sound bricks cleaned for reuse.

Ask any other bricklayer how deep the joints are raked and whether by hand or with a disc, what the mortar mix is, and how reclaimed bricks will be matched.

Some homes in Walhampton and Portmore are flats or maisonettes, in small blocks or in houses divided up after they were built. 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.

For a flat in Walhampton and Portmore 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, not 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.

Our brickwork covers Walhampton, Portmore, Pilley, South Baddesley, Boldre and the Lymington side of SO41. You are 13.7 miles from our Boscombe base, and the travel is included in the quote rather than added on. The planning authority is the National Park.

We are Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, number 15471719 on the register for England and Wales. The owner, Thomas Hannen, looks at your wall and prices it himself. A verified customer has rated us 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. Both the visit and the itemised written quote are free. Before you book a visit in Walhampton and Portmore, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Walhampton and Portmore 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.