Ashley Heath repointing, all of it at eye level

Cavity brickwork from the seventies and eighties. Half the houses here went up between 1945 and 1982 and another quarter after that, so almost everything is cavity work: a single outer skin of fired brick in a cement and sand mortar, struck weather or bucket handle. Mortar of that age rarely washes out the way a soft old joint does. It pits and opens at the arris, water stands in the hollow, and the first proper frost lifts flakes off the brick either side. Matching it means matching the sand and the gauge as well as the colour, so a trial panel goes up on a discreet elevation for you to see in daylight.

Raking out, and why not with a grinder. Joints come out to about twice their width, the perpends by hand. A disc cutter is quick on a long straight bed joint and it is also how a wall gets its arrises taken off, which is why plenty of cheap repointing looks worse after a year than what it replaced. Joints are damped down before filling so the mix cures rather than flashing off, then brushed back once it has taken up.

Spalled faces. Where a face has blown we cut the brick out whole and turn or replace it against a sample held on the wall, rather than filling the hollow with mortar that never matches and drops out within a couple of winters. On this stock the damage collects under sills, beside downpipes and in the courses just above the damp proof course where a drive has been laid hard against the house.

Chimneys and the odd bit at height. Not every bungalow here has a stack, but where there is one it is the oldest and coldest masonry on the building, with weather on four sides and nothing warming it. Its joints go friable long before anything at ground level, and the penetrating damp that follows shows on a ceiling. That wants a scaffold. Almost everything else on a single storey elevation is reachable from a tower.

Porch, garage and low front walls. The brickwork around a porch, either side of a garage opening or along the front of a plot has no shelter and often a coping that has stopped doing its job. Water gets into the top, freezes and works the joints apart from inside. Repointing the coping and the exposed face is short work.

The little that is genuinely old. Only a small share of the houses here predate 1919, but where a property is solid wall rather than cavity the answer changes: an NHL lime or lime putty mix matched to the original sand, so the wall can still lose water through the joint. A hard modern mix on a soft old wall is the fastest way to lose the brick faces.

No rate per square metre: the area tells you almost nothing until somebody has looked at what the joints are actually like.

Getting to it. A detached bungalow with a long weather side, a chalet with a dormer gable and a low wall across the front of a plot are three different set ups, and only one needs a proper platform. A chimney or a gable wants a scaffold, and how long the platform stands matters as much as how big it is. Access under the work at height rules is a priced line, not absorbed into a rate.

The joints decide it, not the wall. How deep the joints have to come back, and whether the faces have already spalled, sets the hours far more than the area does. Hand raking is slow, but a disc widens the joint and takes the arris off.

Matching is the part that shows. Too strong a mix holds water against a soft brick and the face blows off in the first hard frost. Lime is the right answer on most pre-1919 walls here.

Comparing quotes? Ask how deep the joints are raked and by hand or disc, what the mix is and whether it was matched, how many spalled bricks are being replaced, and whether the scaffold is in the price.

More than half the homes in Ashley Heath are bungalows, and that changes a repointing job in a way people do not expect. On a two storey house nobody looks closely at the pointing above the ground floor windows, so a slight difference in colour is invisible from the pavement. On a single storey elevation the whole run of wall sits between waist and shoulder height. Every metre of it gets looked at, from a foot away.

So on this stock the matching and the strike are not finishing touches, they are the work. We mix in consistent batches rather than making up a fresh gauge whenever we run out, keep one person striking a given elevation so the profile does not drift, and finish at a corner or an opening rather than stopping halfway along a wall. It also means we would rather do a whole elevation than a patch.

We cover Ashley Heath, St Leonards, St Ives and across to Ringwood and Verwood, broadly BH24, under Dorset Council. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of 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.