Repointing in Bearwood, BH11

The exposed gable. On a Bearwood estate laid out in the seventies and eighties there is usually one elevation catching the weather off the open ground and three that are sheltered by the next house along. That one face weathers years ahead of the rest.

The joints do not wash out, they erode back at the edges until water can stand in them, and then a sharp frost lifts the mortar in flakes and takes brick faces with it. Patch repointing an exposed gable, cutting out the handful of spalled bricks and leaving the rest alone, is the right repair on a house of this age, and it is a matter of days.

Where a joint has been made too strong or too weak. Estate brickwork went up fast, and the mortar gauge varied from plot to plot with the weather and the mixer. Too weak and the joint is friable and comes away under a thumbnail. Too strong and the joint outlives the brick, so the faces spall while the pointing looks perfect. We test a few joints on the visit rather than guess, because the two problems look identical from the pavement and want opposite repairs.

Sills, bays, porches and garage returns. Water that ought to be thrown clear of a wall very often is not. A cracked sill, a blocked gutter or a downpipe discharging onto brick keeps one strip of wall permanently wet, and that strip is where the mortar goes first. We deal with the joints and tell you what is soaking them, because repointing a wall that is still being rained on from a gutter is money thrown away. Bay returns and the low brick either side of a garage opening get the same treatment.

Boundary walls, and the bottom three courses. Terraced and semi detached plots in Bearwood nearly all have a low brick wall to the front or a dividing wall between drives, and those have no shelter at all and often no damp proof course. They wick water up, the bottom courses go soft, and coping joints open and let the rain into the top. Raking out and repointing the top and the exposed face, and cutting out the worst of the frost damaged bricks, keeps them standing.

What we do not put on your wall. There is no pre-1919 stock in Bearwood at all. The NHL lime and lime putty mixes we use on Victorian and Edwardian solid wall property in the older parts of town would be too soft for a fired modern brick in a cavity, and putting lime on your house because it sounds traditional would be the wrong answer. Your wall wants a cement and sand mortar gauged to suit the brick, matched on colour and struck to the profile that is already there, which on this stock is nearly always bucket handle.

Repointing in Bearwood has no square metre rate; the joints tell you the size of the job. Access. A two storey semi with a gable reachable from a tower, a detached house with a chimney on the ridge, and a dividing wall between two drives are three different set-ups and three lines on the quote. The work at height rules are why access is priced on its own.

Depth. Joints should be raked back to sound mortar. Hand raking is slow; a disc is faster but risks widening the joint and chipping the arris, so we keep it to the middle of the joint.

The mix. The houses here are post-war, mostly hard fired facing brick laid in cement mortar. A cement, lime and sand mix suits them and moves a little with the wall. A pure lime mortar is right on soft old brick, and that is rare in Bearwood. Too strong a mix on any brick risks spalled faces after a hard frost.

Colour and finish. Matching the sand and the joint profile, flush, bucket handle or weathered, is what makes new pointing disappear.

The cause. Joints washed out under a leaking gutter or downpipe will wash out again unless that is fixed first.

Ask other quotes how deep the joints are raked and with what, what the mix is, how many spalled bricks come out, and whether the scaffold is in the price.

Bearwood is unusual for this side of the conurbation in having no Victorian or Edwardian housing in it whatsoever. Four fifths of it went up between the end of the war and the end of the nineteen eighties, and the peak decade is the eighties.

Every one of those houses is a cavity wall: an outer skin of hard fired brick, an air gap, and an inner leaf. That single fact settles most of the arguments about mortar before they start.

It matters because the advice you find online about repointing is mostly written about solid walls, where the mortar has to be softer and more breathable than the brick so the wall can dry outwards. Your wall does not dry that way. The cavity does that work. Putting a soft lime mix into a modern joint on an exposed Bearwood gable gives you a joint that erodes again inside a decade. So when you compare quotes here, the question is not lime or cement, it is what gauge of cement mortar, matched to what, and struck to which profile. If somebody quotes you for lime repointing on an eighties house without looking at the brick first, they have not looked at the brick.

Kinson, Wallisdown, Ensbury Park and Merley are all on our repointing patch, along with Bearwood itself, 5 miles from our Boscombe base. That spans BH10 and BH11, under Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council. The firm you deal with is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Bearwood, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Its owner is Thomas Hannen, who scrapes the joints, measures the walls and prices the work himself. Checkatrade has a verified customer's 10 out of 10 on our profile. No charge applies to the visit or to the written quote, broken into its parts.

Most repairs in Bearwood 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.