Repointing at Lover, matched to the oldest mortar

The house walls. Most of the older fabric in Lover 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 Lover wall is the usual thing that needs putting 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 in Lover 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 in Lover 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.

How big the wall is says little. The state of the joints and the brick sets the hours. Cutting out. Soft brick has to be raked out by hand with a plugging chisel, because a grinder opens the joint up and chips the arris off every brick. It is slow work, and the depth each joint needs going back decides most of the labour.

The mortar. The usual mistake is a mix that is too hard. Cement traps moisture against a soft brick, and one bad frost lifts the face. A lime mortar with a sand chosen to match the colour suits most older solid walls, and because it cures slowly it takes longer.

Exposure. The most exposed walls in Lover face south west, and that is where joints wash out first. Sometimes only that elevation and the chimney need doing, and the quote should say so rather than pricing the whole house.

Spalled bricks. Each one cut out and replaced with a match is counted.

Access. A garden wall off the ground, a cottage gable and a stack on a two storey roof are three different set ups, and under the work at height rules the scaffold is a priced line.

Ask the other quotes: how deep, and by hand or by disc? What is the mix, and has it been matched? Is the scaffold in the price?

Plenty of older walls around Lover have had years of repairs done by whoever was available at the time, in whatever mortar was to hand, and it is normal to find three or four different mortars on one elevation once you start scraping. No conservation area covers the village and only a handful of nearby buildings are listed, so most of those walls carry no heritage control, but the right mortar still matters to the brick.

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.

The firm is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 15471719, and it is owned by Thomas Hannen. Thomas scrapes out a test joint on your wall himself before he writes a price. Before you book a visit in Lover, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

We are 18.1 miles away at our Boscombe base and cover Lover, Redlynch, Landford, Nomansland, Whiteparish and Downton. For Lover the National Park Authority is the planning body and Wiltshire Council oversees building regulations. On Checkatrade a verified customer rated us 10 out of 10. Neither the site visit nor the itemised written quote is charged for.

Most repairs in Lover 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.