Bricklaying and repointing in West Moors
Repointing, brick repair, chimney stacks and boundary walls in West Moors, Three Legged Cross and the Ferndown side of BH22.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Bricklaying and repointing
Weathered joints and blown brick faces in West Moors
Most of West Moors is single storey, so the brickwork sits low, long and close to the ground. That changes the answer you should be getting. On the average bungalow here the joints have gone on the exposed gable and in the bottom few courses, and the rest of the wall is sound, so what you want priced is those elevations rather than the whole building. A good deal of it is reachable off a tower, which keeps the access line down.
People ring us about the same few things. A joint on the west gable that has weathered back far enough to get a key into. A row of brick faces above a path that have blown and gone soft after a frost. A low front wall to the road that has started to lean, or a gate pier rocking on its base. Sometimes it is a stack that looks out of square from the pavement.
We come and look at the wall, all the way round, before anybody talks about a price. West Moors is mostly cavity brickwork from the middle decades of the last century, with older solid walls in the older part of the village, and what the wall is made of decides the mortar mix before anything else does. You get a straight answer on what needs doing this year and what will keep, then an itemised written quote. The site visit and the quote are free.
The work
The brickwork jobs we do around West Moors
The bottom four courses. West Moors is bungalow country, 50.9 per cent of the housing, and this is the job it gives us more than any other, because the wall meets the ground all the way round rather than only under the front door. Rain comes off a low roof, hits a path or a patio and splashes straight back at the same band of brickwork year after year. Add a raised border, a drive laid over the old one and a soakaway that has stopped taking water in ground that shrinks and swells, and the damp proof course ends up bridged. We cut out the spalled faces, repoint the plinth, and get the ground level back below the dpc so the wall can dry. Approved Document H covers where the surface water is allowed to go.
Repointing the gable. On a bungalow the gable is the only tall piece of wall on the building and it takes the weather while the long low elevations sit half sheltered by the eaves, so it is usually one elevation rather than four. We rake the joints out by hand to about twice their width, deep enough to key and no deeper, and keep a disc cutter off anything soft, because the cut widens the joint for good. What goes back is matched, with the sand picked for colour and grain against what came out, and the profile goes back as the wall has it. You approve a sample panel on your own wall in daylight before we start.
Nearly every plot here has a dwarf wall or a pier to the road sitting on almost no footing, and once the coping loses its bedding the top of the wall fills with water and pushes out. We reset or replace coping so it throws water clear, take down and rebuild bowed lengths off a proper base, and tie a gate pier into the boundary rather than leave it standing on the end of it. 64.6 per cent of the housing went up between 1945 and 1982, peaking around 1970, so the cavity work fails together: horizontal cracking every fifth or sixth bed joint where a tie has corroded and jacked the wall, a cracked lintel over the garage opening, a crack stepping up from a window corner. Ties are replaced from outside without taking the wall down. A bungalow stack is short and stands in clear air, so the flaunching cracks and the top courses lose their pointing early, and we rebuild from below the damage reusing sound brick.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
Repointing and like-for-like brick repair count as repair, so at an ordinary West Moors address there is nothing to apply for. There is no conservation area over the village and a single listed entry in the parish, but on that building even straight repointing counts as alteration and needs listed building consent from Dorset Council. Changing the look of an elevation rather than putting it back can need planning permission, and the Planning Portal sets out where that line falls. A new or rebuilt front wall has its own height limits under the guidance on walls, gates and fences. A new lintel or an underpinned footing goes through building control, and where a wall is shared the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 sets a notice period. We work that out at the survey and write it into the quote.
Cost
What decides the price of a brickwork job
No rate per square metre. Access first: a bungalow gable you can stand a tower against, a front boundary wall you work off the pavement and a stack that needs a scaffold to the ridge are three different set ups. How long the platform stands matters as much as its size, and work at height rules are why it is a priced line. Then the joints, how deep they come out and whether the faces have already spalled. Ask whether the raking is by hand or by disc, and whether the scaffold is included.
If something has moved
Loose brickwork, or a wall that has shifted
Ring rather than use the form. Anything overhead or leaning goes to the front of the queue, and the first visit is about making it safe. Around West Moors it is usually a roadside wall or a pier clipped by a vehicle turning into a drive, and anything leaning over a footway is propped on that first visit. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
The one local thing
Bungalow country, and why the low courses go first
Half the dwellings in West Moors are bungalows, and that single fact changes what is worth spending money on. A bungalow has the same floor area as a house and roughly twice the perimeter at ground level, so there is far more low brickwork per household and far less high brickwork.
The wall that a two storey house keeps out of trouble by being tall is, here, the wall that everything happens to: splash off the path, a border banked up against it, a hose reel and a water butt overflowing in the same spot for years, a drive relaid an inch higher than the last one.
So look down before you look up. Walk the perimeter after heavy rain and see where the ground is dark against the wall and where the brick faces are flaking. Find the damp proof course, the thin dark line two or three courses up, and check that nothing has been built or banked over it. Check that each downpipe discharges into a gully rather than onto the paving.
That is where your repointing budget earns its keep on a bungalow, and it is why a quote to wrap the whole building is usually the wrong quote here. Access is the other half of it. With no first floor, most of the wall is workable off a tower, so that line should be a fraction of what the same job costs on a house.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
West Moors is about seven miles from the yard, straight up the road, so it is an easy run and we do not charge you for the distance. We cover BH22 and the villages around it, Ferndown, Three Legged Cross, Verwood, St Leonards and Ashley Heath, along with the rest of east Dorset.
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.
Questions
West Moors questions we get asked
Half the village is bungalows. Does that change the work?
It changes the access and the ground line. Bungalows are 50.9% of West Moors, so most of the brickwork I price here is long, low and within a couple of courses of the soil. That means splashback off paths and borders does more harm than wind ever manages, and a tower or a low lift covers the job instead of a full elevation of scaffold going up.
Why has the same wall failed at my neighbour's too?
Because the houses were built within a couple of years of each other. West Moors is 64.6% post war stock from 1945 to 1982, with 29.0% of it in the late sixties and early seventies, so the same mix was used in the same weather on both. It reaches the end of its life at the same time. Where two owners go in together, one set of access equipment covers both fronts.
The bricks near the path are crumbling. Is that age?
It is water, and the ground under West Moors stays wet, so the base of a wall rarely gets a proper chance to dry. Rain bounces off hard paving back onto the lowest courses, the brick face soaks up and then freezes, and the face flakes away while the joints above still look fine. Blown bricks get cut out and replaced, and the paving is made to shed water away from the wall.
Only one building here is listed. Do we need consent?
For repointing, none at all. West Moors has a single listed entry and no conservation area of its own, so repair work to an ordinary house here is not a planning matter for Dorset Council in any way. The real constraint is technical rather than administrative. A mix stronger than the brick causes damage nobody can undo, and that decision is made at the quote stage, not on the scaffold.
Will one elevation of a bungalow be finished in a day?
Reckon on a day to rake out and a day to point, weather permitting, because the runs here are long but low and there is no working between ladder positions. Frost sets the limit rather than the size of the wall. A fresh joint will not survive a hard night, so in a cold snap the elevation gets covered and the day is lost rather than the mortar.
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Bricklaying and repointing near West Moors
Bricklaying and repointing nearby
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