Fordingbridge repointing and lime mortar work

Soft red brick in lime, in the older streets. Solid wall, no cavity, and the wall keeps water out by soaking it up and letting it evaporate back out through the joint. It has to stay breathable, so the mortar has to be softer and more open than the brick beside it. Joints come out by hand to about twice their width, with the angle grinder left in the van, and go back in an NHL lime or lime putty mix gauged to the original sand for colour and grain. They are damped down before filling and brushed back once the mix has taken up. On a period frontage the profile is usually flush or slightly recessed rather than the weather struck or bucket handle joint you find on later work, and we copy whatever survives somewhere sheltered on the building.

Cement pointing on those same walls. A great deal of the old stock was repointed in sand and cement between the sixties and the nineties, and undoing it is a steady part of what we do here. A hard joint on a soft brick will not let the wall dry through the mortar, so the water leaves through the brick faces instead and frost takes them off. Joints standing proud and hard with hollowed bricks between them is the tell. It comes out by hand, joint by joint, and it is priced as its own line because it is slower than a wall nobody has touched.

Later cavity brickwork, which is most of the town. Better than four homes in ten here were built between 1945 and 1982, with the busiest years in the seventies and early eighties. That is a single outer skin of fired brick in a cement and sand mortar. It erodes at the arris rather than washing out, water starts to stand in the open joint, and a hard frost lifts the face off. Matching it means matching the sand and the gauge as well as the colour, and a trial panel goes up somewhere discreet for you to judge in daylight.

Faces that have blown, cut out rather than filled. Where the face of a brick has gone we cut the brick out whole and turn or replace it against a sample held on the wall. A mortar patch in the hollow never matches and drops out inside a couple of winters. Frost damage gathers under sills, beside downpipes and in the courses just above the damp proof course where a drive or a path has been laid up against the house.

The ground floor courses on walls near the water. Walls close to the Avon and its meadows sit in damper ground and stay wet longer after rain, and it is the bottom band that shows it: loose, crumbling joints in the lowest courses with the wall above sound. Those get the most permeable mix on the building, kept softer than what is above them, because on a wall with no damp proof course that band is sacrificial and meant to be renewed rather than sealed.

Stacks and parapets. A chimney has weather on four sides and nothing warming it from inside, so its joints go friable years ahead of the walls and the penetrating damp that follows lands on a top floor ceiling. We repoint the stack, cut out the frost damaged bricks and renew the flaunching round the pots in one visit. It is work at height and wants a scaffold rather than a tower, and the platform is the honest bulk of that cost, which is why doing it all at once is worth more than it sounds.

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

Getting to it. A three storey house on the High Street with the pavement hard against it, a riverside cottage with a garden you can get a tower into and a seventies semi with one gable are three different set ups. 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 Fordingbridge, Sandleheath, Alderholt, Godshill, Hyde and Breamore, broadly SP6, under New Forest District 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'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.