Repointing flint and brick walls in Iwerne Minster

A flint panel is pointed differently. Tap a suspect panel first: a hollow note, or mortar crumbling out between your fingers, means the bedding has gone and is usually where penetrating damp starts. A flint wall is not laid to a course.

The stones are bedded into a thick mortar and it is the mortar that holds the wall together, so the joints are irregular in both width and depth and the material between the flints is doing structural work rather than filling a gap. That changes the method completely, and it rules out a disc cutter or angle grinder: a straight kerf through work that was never straight loosens a stone before it cleans a joint. You cannot rake to twice the joint width, because on flint that measure means nothing and the depth you would reach takes the bedding out from under the stones and loosens more than it fixes. We judge the depth stone by stone, take out only what is genuinely perished, and leave anything sound alone. Loose flints come out and go back properly bedded, and the galleting, the small chips pressed into the joint, goes back where the original had it, because it is not decoration: it stops a wide joint slumping while it cures.

The mix for flint, and why it is coarser. Joints between flints on an Iwerne Minster wall run wide and irregular where a brick bed joint runs at a consistent ten millimetres. A fine mortar filling a wide joint shrinks as it dries and cracks away from the stone either side, which is the typical fault on flintwork that has been pointed by somebody used to brick. So the mix for a flint panel carries a coarser, well graded sharp sand, sometimes with a little chalk or brick dust to match the original, and it goes in in more than one pass rather than being buttered on in a single thickness. The finish sits back slightly from the face of the stones rather than being smeared flush across them, which is what makes a flint wall read as flint from the lane instead of looking rendered.

Brick dressings, quoins and lacing courses. On an Iwerne Minster wall the brickwork framing the flint is ordinary coursed work and it rakes and points normally, but it wants a different mix from the panel beside it, matched to the brick rather than to the stone. On banded flint and brick the two run through the same elevation in alternating bands, so both mortars are on the wall at once and the joint where they meet has to be handled cleanly. It is slower than pointing a plain brick wall and it is the part that shows from the road.

Undoing a cement repoint. This is the repair Iwerne Minster walls need most. A solid wall is breathable by design, and hard cement stops water leaving through the joint, so it leaves through the flint or the brick face instead and the first hard frost takes the face off. Flint fails worse than brick does when this happens, because a flint has nothing to lose off its surface: instead of spalling a face, it lets go of the wall entirely. Taking cement out of a flint joint without disturbing the stones is careful, slow work, and it is the reason a proper price for it looks nothing like a price for brick pointing.

Stacks, copings and gate piers. Stacks in Iwerne Minster are exposed on every side and normally fail first, wanting repointing above the flashing, perished brick cut out and the flaunching renewed around the pots. The flint and brick walls along the lanes and driveways fail from the top down: once the coping lets water into the core the joints in the panel below go, and then the wall bows. Getting a coping rebedded and the top courses pointed is the cheap end of that story.

A rate per square metre would mislead you here. A wall can look fine from the lane and have joints that crumble a finger's depth in.

Depth of the joints. Joints should be raked back to sound mortar, usually a good deal deeper than they are wide. On soft brick that is done by hand, because a grinder widens the joint and chips the arris off the brick. It is slow, and it is most of the price.

The mix. Lime is right for most of the older walls in Iwerne Minster. It lets a solid wall breathe, and it gives before the brick does. A cement mix on soft brick holds water at the face, and one hard frost then takes the face off. Matching colour on flint work means testing sands in a trial panel first.

Access. A garden wall is worked off the ground. A gable or a chimney needs scaffold, and it has to stay up for as long as the lime needs protecting, which is its own line under the work at height rules.

Repairs within it. Spalled bricks cut out and replaced, and loose flints re-bedded, are counted one area at a time.

Put these to another quote: how deep are the joints raked, and how? What is the mix, and was it matched? Is the scaffold included?

Most quotes for repointing in this village are written as though the wall were brick, and that is the single most useful thing to watch for. Flint and brick sit in the same elevation on a great many buildings around the Iwerne valley, and they are two different jobs measured in the same square metre.

Brick pointing is fast and predictable: consistent joints, a known depth, one mix. Flint pointing is slow, the depth has to be judged stone by stone, the mix is coarser and goes in in more than one pass, and there is nothing to stop a careless rake from loosening a face of stones that then has to be rebedded before anything can be pointed at all.

So if you are comparing prices, ask each one to split the flint from the brick and give the mix for each separately. A quote that shows one rate across the whole elevation is either going to be repriced once the work starts or is going to treat your flintwork the way it treats brickwork, and the second is worse than the first. It is also worth asking what happens to loose stones, because rebedding is part of the job on flint and not a variation. We separate the two on every quote here, and we make up sample panels on both, left a few days before you judge them, because lime lightens a great deal as it dries.

Our base is in Boscombe, 20.8 miles south of the village, and we take repointing work in the village, in Iwerne Courtney and Fontmell Magna, and down the valley to Blandford Forum, all under Dorset Council.

The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. It belongs to Thomas Hannen, and he is the person who checks your joints and writes up the price. Our Checkatrade page carries a verified customer's 10 out of 10. Neither the site visit nor the itemised written quote costs you anything. Before you book a visit in Iwerne Minster, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Iwerne Minster 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.