Repointing in Brockenhurst, inside the National Park

Pre-1900 solid walls in lime. These have no cavity, and they keep water out by letting it soak in and evaporate back out through the joint, which works only while the mortar is softer and more open than the brick. Joints come out by hand to twice their width, never with a disc, and go back in an NHL lime or lime putty mix gauged to the original sand for colour, grain and texture. Where the original joint survives somewhere sheltered we copy it, which is both the right repair and the shortest route through any conservation question.

Big detached houses with long elevations and tall stacks. Better than four in ten homes here are detached, which means large houses standing on their own with nothing sheltering them and a stack you cannot see from the ground. A chimney weathers on four sides with nothing warming it from inside, so its joints go friable long before the walls do, and the penetrating damp that follows lands on a top floor ceiling. Repointing a stack and renewing the flaunching round the pots is work at height and wants a scaffold rather than a tower, so everything up there goes in one visit.

Cement pointing on soft brick. The commonest fault on the older houses is a hard sand and cement joint applied in the last sixty years. It does not let the wall breathe, so the water leaves through the brick faces instead and frost takes them off. The giveaway is joints standing proud and hard with hollowed bricks between them. Taking it back out is patient hand work, priced on its own line.

Post-war cavity brickwork. Around a third of the village went up between 1945 and 1982: a single outer skin of fired brick in a cement and sand mix, struck weather or bucket handle. It erodes at the arris rather than washing out, water stands in the open joint, and frost lifts the surface off in flakes. Matching means the sand and the gauge as well as the colour, and a trial panel goes up somewhere discreet for you to judge in daylight.

Spalled faces. Where a brick face has blown we cut it out whole and turn or replace it against a sample held on the wall. Filling the hollow with mortar leaves a patch that never matches and falls out within a couple of winters, and on a village frontage that patchwork is what everybody sees, so the replacement brick is agreed before we commit.

No rate per square metre, because the square metres tell you almost nothing until somebody has looked at the joints.

Getting to it. A large detached house with two stacks and a long gable, a Victorian cottage on the village street with the pavement against it, and a garden wall behind a hedge need three different platforms. How long the platform stands matters as much as how big it is, and the work at height rules are why access is a priced line rather than one absorbed into a rate.

The joints decide it, not the wall. Raking out by hand is slow, and on soft brick it is the only safe way. How deep the joints come back, and whether the faces have already spalled, sets the hours far more than the 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 is slower to work and to cure, and it is the right answer on most pre-1919 walls.

Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs, so ask each one how deep the joints are raked and whether the scaffold is in the price.

We cover Brockenhurst, Sway, Boldre, Lyndhurst and out towards Beaulieu, broadly SO42 and the SO41 villages next to it, under the New Forest National Park Authority. 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'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.