Repointing exposed walls in Barton on Sea

The elevation facing the sea goes first. The south west face in Barton on Sea runs a decade ahead of the sheltered sides. Driven rain arrives with force enough to work into an open joint rather than run off it, so the mortar washes back, water stands in the recess and frost takes the arris off the brick. That is why we price by elevation.

Late fifties and sixties cavity brickwork. More than half of Barton on Sea went up between 1945 and 1982, the busiest years by a distance being the late fifties and early sixties. That is a single outer skin of fired brick in cement and sand, often gauged with a little lime, weather struck or bucket handle. The joint erodes at the arris rather than cracking, and the face goes in flakes once water sits in it. A trial panel goes up somewhere discreet, matched for sand, gauge, texture and colour as it will look weathered.

The older end of Barton on Sea. A small share of the town predates 1919 and is solid wall rather than cavity: no gap behind the brick, so it sheds water only by evaporation through the joint and has to stay breathable. Those get an NHL lime or lime putty mix matched to the original sand, finished flush or slightly recessed. Either way the method is the same: joints out to twice their width by hand, the angle grinder left in the van, damped down before filling and brushed back once the mix has taken up.

Salt fretted faces. At just over a kilometre from the water, salt arrives as spray carried inland rather than clean rain. It soaks into the outer few millimetres of joint and brick, holds damp between showers, then crystallises as the wall dries and breaks the material apart. Spalling shows first under sills, beside downpipes and just above ground, and where a face has gone we cut the brick out whole and turn or replace it against a sample off the wall.

Squat stacks on single storey roofs. Four homes in ten in Barton on Sea are bungalows, so there are a great many short wide chimneys with weather on all four sides and nothing warming them. Their joints go loose and friable long before the house walls do. We repoint the stack, renew the flaunching round the pots and make good the junctions, priced as its own line. A low stack sometimes comes off a tower; anything on a main ridge is a scaffold.

Communal elevations. Getting on for a fifth of the homes in Barton on Sea are flats, often in blocks taking the weather on one whole face, and we price for a management company as readily as for a single owner. Major works are usually consulted on under section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.

Nobody should price repointing by the square metre before looking closely at the joints. Access. A clifftop bungalow with a short stack, a post-war semi with one gable to the sea, and a block of flats on the cliff road each need something different.

A chimney or gable gets scaffold, low walls a tower or nothing. How long the platform stays up matters as much as its size, which is why the work at height rules give it a separate line.

How the joints come out. Hand raking is slow work. On soft brick it is the only safe way, because a disc cutter opens the joint up and chips the arris. How deep the old mortar has gone, and how many brick faces have already spalled, decides the hours far more than the size of the wall.

What goes back in. Hard cement pointing traps water in a soft brick, and the face pops off in a hard frost. On the handful of Barton on Sea walls built before the First World War, lime is the right mortar. On post-war brick a matched mix still matters, because sea air and driven rain wear hardest where a hard joint sits against a softer brick.

How exposed the wall is. A gable facing the sea needs a denser, well struck joint that sheds water. A sheltered back wall does not.

Ask other quotes how deep they will rake and whether by hand, what mortar they will use and whether it is matched, how many damaged bricks they have allowed for, and whether scaffold is in the price.

Nothing stands between these Barton on Sea houses and the Channel, and BS 8104, the code that grades walls for wind driven rain, puts this coast at the severe end of the scale. The obvious effect is how fast a joint wears out. The less obvious one is that it decides when the work can be done at all.

Mortar has almost no strength for its first day in the joint. A wet south westerly off the water will wash a freshly struck joint back out, and it will still look filled from the ground while being hollow behind. Lime is worse, because it sets slowly by taking up carbon dioxide from the air, and a lime joint caught by frost before it has cured is finished. So on the seaward elevation we work to the forecast, not the diary, and come back another day instead of pushing on through a bad afternoon.

For a Barton on Sea wall that means planning the calendar as carefully as the mix. Do not book a seaward elevation in lime for the back end of the year if it can wait for spring. And ask anybody quoting what happens when the weather turns.

Repointing jobs in Barton on Sea are seven and a half miles from our base in Boscombe. Stacks and gables on the clifftop, walls in Barton Court and Becton, and houses further along at Milford on Sea and Highcliffe are all within reach.

New Forest District Council decides anything that needs consent. We trade as Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, number 15471719. Thomas Hannen owns it, and he looks at your joints himself before he prices a job. A Checkatrade customer, verified, scored us 10 out of 10. The site visit and the itemised quote on paper cost nothing. Before you book a visit in Barton on Sea, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Barton on Sea 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.