Repointing at Lover, matched to the oldest mortar

The house walls. Most of the older fabric is solid wall, one thickness of handmade brick bedded in lime with no cavity behind it. Those joints come out by hand with a plugging chisel to roughly twice their width, and go back in a natural hydraulic lime gauged softer than the brick, so the mortar carries the wear instead of the face. We damp down the wall, work in lifts, and brush the joints back once the mix has taken up. The profile goes back flush or slightly recessed on pre-1919 brickwork, not the weather struck or bucket handle finish a later house takes. No angle grinder on brick this soft: a disc cutter widens the joint and takes the arris off for good.

The frontage somebody has already had a go at. A stripe of hard sand and cement across an old wall is the commonest thing we are asked to put right. A solid wall has to stay breathable, and a dense joint stops it drying through the mortar, so water leaves through the brick face instead and one cold night lifts the surface off. Where the joints have washed out as well, penetrating damp shows on the inside face after a wet week. It reads plainly from the garden: crisp proud pointing, brick eaten back behind it. Getting the cement out is slow hand work, and it is the only repair that deals with the cause.

Blown faces. A spalled brick will not recover and pointing round it only tidies the problem up, so the brick is cut out whole and a reclaimed match of the same size and colour bedded in. Where more than about a third of an elevation has gone, a patch will read as a patch, and we say so. Frost damage gathers under sills, beside a downpipe and in the courses just above ground where a path or border has been built up against the wall.

Stacks and flaunching. A chimney takes weather on four sides with nothing warming it from inside, so it goes friable long before the house walls do, and the flaunching that beds the pots cracks after it. Repointing above the roof line means a scaffold, priced as its own line on the quote.

Outbuilding and garden wall faces. Low brickwork has no shelter and often nothing much over the top of it, so water gets into the head of the wall, freezes and opens the joints from above. Repointing the top courses and re-bedding a lifted coping is quick work next to what happens if the head stays open.

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 garden wall you work off the ground, a cottage gable and a stack on a two storey roof are three different set ups before a joint is opened, and the work at height rules are why the scaffold is a priced line rather than 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.

Better than a quarter of what stands around Lover predates 1919 and much of it predates 1900, and none of it is protected. No conservation area covers the village and only a handful of addresses are listed. That means a century of repairs done by whoever was available at the time, in whatever was in the yard, and it is normal to find three or four different mortars on one elevation once you start scraping.

Which matters, because the usual way of matching a mortar is to take a sample and copy it. Do that on a wall like this and you have a fair chance of copying somebody's 1975 patch rather than the wall itself. So the sample comes off the oldest sound original we can find, usually a sheltered joint where nothing has ever been touched, and it is checked against a second one elsewhere on the building before anything is mixed.

The second decision is what to do with the earlier repairs, and it is yours rather than ours. A sound lime patch can stay, and taking it out risks brick for nothing. A hard cement patch holding water in the wall should come out, whatever it looks like. A sound cement patch on a sheltered face is a genuine choice: leave it and the elevation reads in two colours, take it out and you are paying to remove something that is doing no harm. We put both options in the quote with the areas marked.

We cover Lover, Redlynch, Landford, Nomansland, Whiteparish and Downton, broadly SP5, 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.