Repointing in Cadnam and Bartley, matched at eye level

Pre-1919 solid walls. Close to a quarter of the housing here predates 1919: single skin solid walls of handmade brick bedded in lime, with no cavity behind them. A wall like that never stays bone dry and was never meant to. Rain wets the face, the moisture travels and leaves again through the joints, which is why the mortar was made weaker than the brick. We rake those out by hand to about twice the joint width and point back in a natural hydraulic lime with the sand matched to what came out. No disc cutter goes near them, because it widens the joint and takes the arris off a soft face for good.

Post-war cavity brickwork. Most of the rest of the two villages is later, the busiest years being the late sixties and early seventies: a brick outer skin with a cavity behind, laid in a cement and sand mortar and struck weather or bucket handle. They fail differently. The joint does not wash out so much as open at the arris on exposed corners and along the top course, and once water stands in it a frost lifts the face off the brick. On those walls a gauged mix matched for strength and sand is right, and lime would be soft for no reason.

Telling one from the other. Around a fifth of the stock is inter-war, the awkward middle: early cavity or solid, in a weak gauged mortar with lime in it, and a modern strong mix put back into one of those sheds brick faces within a few winters. We settle which wall we are in front of before anything is mixed.

Matching, and the trial panel. Colour in a mortar comes from the sand rather than the binder, so a sample of sound original is taken from a sheltered joint, broken down and matched for colour and grain. Then a trial panel goes up on your own wall and is left to dry, because wet mortar reads darker than it finishes.

Spalled faces and stacks. Where a face has blown, pointing round it only frames the damage, so the brick is cut out whole and a match bedded in. On the older cottages that means reclaimed stock, which takes longer to source than to lay. Stacks stand clear of everything and lose their joints and flaunching first, and that comes off a scaffold shown as its own line.

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

Getting to it. A detached house set well back, a bungalow with low eaves you can reach off a tower, and a stack on a main ridge are three different set ups before a joint is opened. The work at height rules are why the scaffold is a priced line, not something 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.

Matching is the part that shows. Too strong a mix is the classic mistake, and one hard frost takes the face off soft brick. Lime is right on most pre-1919 walls here.

Comparing quotes? Ask how deep the joints are raked and by hand or by disc, what the mix is and whether it has been matched, and whether the scaffold is in the price. Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs.

A quarter of the homes here are bungalows and most of the rest are detached with low eaves on open plots, so a great deal of this brickwork is looked at from a metre away. On a two storey terrace a mortar a shade off reads as nothing from the pavement, because you see the wall at an angle from thirty feet. On a single storey elevation you walk past the joint every day at eye level, and a mismatch is obvious for years.

That makes the sand the decisive part of the specification rather than a detail. The binder gives the mortar its strength, but the colour and texture you see are the sand, so it is matched off a sample of the original and proved on a trial panel left to dry on your own wall. Judging it wet is how people end up with a stripe.

The other consequence is how much you do at once. A lot of the later brickwork here is machine made facing brick with very regular joints, and on that a patch of new pointing reads as a rectangle from the garden however good the match is. So on an exposed corner or a top course we take the pointing out to a natural break rather than stopping where the failure stops. It costs a little more on the day and saves you looking at the join.

We cover Cadnam, Bartley, Copythorne, Winsor, Ashurst and Netley Marsh, broadly SO40, with the New Forest National Park Authority for planning and New Forest District Council for building control. 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.