Bricklaying and repointing in Wool

Wall ties. This is the job Wool gives us more than any other, because 55.0 per cent of the housing went up between 1945 and 1982 and it peaks in the 1970s and early 1980s. Stretcher bond outside, blockwork inner leaf, ties bridging the cavity. When those ties corrode they swell and jack the bed joint apart, so you get a horizontal crack repeating up the wall at the tie spacing, most often on the gable that takes the weather, which here is the south west face. Left long enough the outer leaf starts to bow away from the inner. Ties are replaced from outside, drilled and fixed through the joint and made good, without taking the wall down or emptying the house, and we survey a sample of the cavity first so you know how many are going in before you get a price.

Lintels and cracked openings. The second thing this cohort does is drop a window or door head. A corroded steel lintel expands the same way a tie does and lifts the courses above it, and a garage opening spanned optimistically in the first place sags in the middle. We support, cut out and replace the lintel, rebuild the courses above and repoint so the repair does not read across the front of the house. Repointing itself is usually the one weather gable rather than four elevations: joints raked by hand to about twice their width, a measured cement and sand mix back in on the post-war brick with the sand chosen for colour and grain, and a cured sample panel on your own wall before we start. On the older solid walls near the river, and 12.0 per cent of Wool predates 1919, it is an NHL lime mix instead and hand tools only.

Once a face has spalled, frost gets in behind and lifts the next layer, so blown brick is replaced one at a time rather than patched over, matched for size, texture and colour, and we work out what soaked the wall in the first place. Estate boundary walls here are low, long and built on very little footing in ground that shrinks and swells, and with terraces at 25.8 per cent and semis at 24.7 per cent the wall between two front gardens usually belongs to both of you. We reset or replace coping so the head of the wall throws water clear, rebuild bowed lengths off a proper base, and tie a gate pier into the wall rather than leave it standing on the end of it. Stacks lose their flaunching, then the pointing on the top courses, then they lean, and plenty out here are no longer serving anything, so we either rebuild from below the damage or take a redundant stack down and make the roof good, with the access priced as its own line. New work is the rest: extensions, porches, garden rooms and garden walls, with a footing sized for the ground and the outer skin toothed into the existing bond.

No rate per square metre. Access first: a semi where the gable is half your neighbour's, a terraced row where one scaffold serves three houses and a cottage in the old part with a lane down one side 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. On tie replacement it is the number of ties that decides it, not the area of wall. Ask what the mix is and whether the scaffold is in.

Wool is about sixteen miles from the yard, an easy run down the A352, and we are in the Purbeck villages regularly. We cover BH20, Wareham, Bovington, Winfrith Newburgh, West Lulworth and Bere Regis, along with the rest of Purbeck.

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.