Bricklaying in Woodlands

Cracks, and what caused them. This is where most Woodlands brickwork trouble starts. We look at the shape of the crack, not just its width. A stepped crack following the bed joints and hairline at one end is telling you something different from a straight vertical split through the bricks themselves.

The ground here shrinks and swells, so we check what is planted nearby, what the footing is likely to be, and whether a gully or a soakaway is emptying next to it, with the Fletchwood tributary forty metres off and flood zone 2 over part of Woodlands. Where the movement has stopped, we cut out and stitch the cracked courses with helical bars bedded into the joints, rebuild the worst of it and repoint. Where it has not stopped, we say so and tell you what needs looking at before any bricklayer touches it.

Boundary walls, and what the trees are doing to them. Plots here are big and the walls are long, old and sitting on very little footing, with mature planting either side. A root does not need to lift a wall to break it, it only needs to dry the ground under one end of it. We rebuild bowed and cracked lengths off a proper base, put a movement joint in where a long run needs one, reset copings so the head of the wall sheds water, and tie gate piers in rather than leave them standing on the end of a wall. On a stack it is the same story from the top down: the flaunching goes, then the pointing on the top courses, then it leans, and we rebuild from below the damage and put the access on the quote as its own line so you can see what the scaffold is costing rather than have it buried in a total.

Repointing here is usually one or two elevations, not four. We rake out by hand to roughly twice the joint width, deep enough to key and no deeper, and keep a disc cutter away from soft old brick because the cut widens the joint for good and takes the arris off. Back in goes a matched mix: an NHL lime on the older solid walls, and 18.7 per cent of Woodlands predates 1919 with another 17.8 per cent between the wars, a measured cement and sand mix on the post-war work, which is 46.5 per cent of it and peaks in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Blown brick is cut out and replaced one at a time, matched for size, texture and colour, reclaimed or handmade where the wall is period, and we find out what soaked it first. On the post-war cavity houses you get horizontal cracking every fifth or sixth bed joint where a tie has corroded and jacked the stretcher bond, and cracked lintels over garage and patio door openings; ties are replaced from outside without taking the wall down. New work is the rest: extensions, garden rooms and brick plinths under timber outbuildings and stables, with footings sized for the ground rather than for the drawing.

Access and how long it stands. A chimney stack on a two storey detached house needs a scaffold round it. A bungalow wall you can barrow to is simple. A wall at the end of a soft track, or among tree roots, means carrying everything in. How long the platform stands matters as much as its size, and the work at height rules are why it is a priced line.

The ground under it. Woodlands sits on clay that shrinks in dry summers and swells in wet winters, and big trees make that worse. A crack that opens and closes with the seasons is ground movement, and rebuilding the wall without dealing with the footing only buys a few years. We say which it is before quoting.

The bricks and the mix. A sixties bungalow in a hard brick takes a cement-based mortar. A pre-war cottage in soft brick needs lime, and a reclaimed brick to match, which takes longer to find and lay.

The repair itself. Stitching a crack, rebuilding a bowed length and taking a stack down to sound brick are priced by the hours they take, not by the metre.

Ask a competing quote what the mortar mix is, whether the footing is being looked at, and whether the scaffold and waste are included.

Woodlands is 17.8 miles from our base in Boscombe, so we plan work in the Forest in advance and tell you straight when we can start. We cover SO40 and the villages around it, Netley Marsh, Ashurst, Bartley, Cadnam and Minstead. Planning is the New Forest National Park Authority, building control New Forest District Council.

Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen owns it, and he is the one who looks at the wall and prices it. A verified Checkatrade customer marked us 10 out of 10. The visit and the written itemised quote are free. Before you book a visit in Woodlands, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Woodlands 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.