Repointing in Bearwood, BH11

The exposed gable. On an 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 commonest job we do around here 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 here 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.

No rate per square metre. The area tells you almost nothing until somebody has looked at the joints.

Getting to it. A two storey semi with a gable you can reach off a tower, a detached house with a chimney on the ridge and a dividing wall between two drives are three different access jobs and three different lines on the quote. The work at height rules are why access is its own priced line.

The joints decide it, not the wall. Raking out by hand is slow, and on soft brick the only safe way: a disc widens the joint and takes the arris off. Depth, and whether faces have already spalled, sets the hours far more than area does.

Matching is the part that shows. Too strong a mix is the classic mistake: cement holds water against a soft brick and the face blows off in the first hard frost. Lime cures slower, and suits most pre-1919 walls here.

Comparing quotes? Ask how deep the joints are raked and by what, what the mix is, how many spalled bricks come out, and whether the scaffold is in the price. Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs.

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.

We cover Bearwood, Kinson, Wallisdown, Ensbury Park and across to Merley, broadly BH10 and BH11, under Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written itemised quote are free.