Repointing in Furzehill, house and outbuildings

Garden and boundary walls. A free standing wall is a single skin with weather on both faces and nothing warming either side, so it never dries between one wet spell and the next.

Water gets in through the top first, wherever the coping has lost its bedding or a joint under it has opened, then freezes and pushes the courses apart. We take the coping bed and the top courses first, rake the faces back to about twice the joint width and point in a permeable mix so the wall can dry both ways.

Outbuildings, granaries and old dairies. An unheated building is wet on the inside face as well as the outside, so its joints go friable years ahead of anything lived in. Most of the older ones are solid wall, built before 1919 with no cavity, and they have to stay breathable: an NHL lime or lime putty mix gauged to the original sand, raked out with hand tools only, damped down, filled and protected while it cures. There are listed farmhouses around Furzehill, Wilksworth Farmhouse among them, and on anything listed the mortar is part of the protected fabric.

The house itself. Getting on for half the homes in Furzehill went up between 1945 and 1982, and that is cavity work: a single skin of hard fired brick in a cement and sand mortar. It fails the other way round from lime. The joint pits and opens at the arris rather than washing out, water stands in the recess, and a hard frost lifts the fired face off in flakes. It wants a gauged mix of similar strength going back in, struck to whatever profile is there, usually weather struck or bucket handle.

Spalled faces, cut out and replaced. Where a face has blown we cut the brick out and turn or replace it against a sample held up on the wall. Filling the hollow with mortar leaves a patch that never matches and drops out within a couple of winters. On these Furzehill plots the damage collects under sills, beside downpipes, along the tops of walls and just above the damp proof course.

Chimney stacks and flaunching. A detached house out in Furzehill often has two, and a stack has weather on four sides with a cold flue up the middle. The mortar goes friable, then open, and the penetrating damp that follows lands on a bedroom ceiling. Repointing in a matched mix and renewing the flaunching around the pots is work at height.

Sampling each structure separately. The mistake worth avoiding on a plot with several ages of brickwork is buying one mortar for all of it. The house, the outbuilding and the garden wall can be a century apart, in different brick with different sand, so each gets its own sample and trial panel.

We cannot give a figure per square metre until the joints have been looked at, because two walls of the same size can be days apart.

Stacks, gables and garden walls. One plot in Furzehill can have a two storey gable, a chimney stack, a single storey garage and a boundary wall. The stack and gable need a scaffold, the garage a tower, and the boundary wall is done from the ground. Each is its own line, with the platform built to the work at height rules.

How far back the joints go. Raking out is where the hours go. Deep joints, or bricks with spalled faces that must be cut out and replaced, matter more than the size of the wall. A grinder is faster than hand tools, but on soft brick it opens the joint up and chips the arris, so there we rake by hand.

The mortar mix. The post-war houses in Furzehill were laid in cement mortar and take a matched cement mix. On the Victorian and older cottages and farm buildings, cement is harder than the brick, so water gathers in the face and frost blows it off; lime is right there, and slower to work and cure.

Colour and finish. Matching an old joint colour can mean trial panels left to dry before the full elevation is started.

When other quotes come in, check whether the joints will be raked out by hand, and how far; what mortar they will use and how they will match it; and whether scaffold is included.

Furzehill is about eight miles from our Boscombe base, and we repoint across Colehill, Holt, Wimborne Minster, Stone, Ferndown and Broadstone, broadly BH21 and BH22. Dorset Council is the planning and building control authority for Furzehill itself.

The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen owns it and prices each repointing job himself after looking at the joints. There is a verified customer's 10 out of 10 for us on Checkatrade. The visit is free, and so is the itemised written quote. Before you book a visit in Furzehill, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Furzehill 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.