Repointing brickwork in Minstead

Solid wall cottages. The older houses here are solid wall, one brick thick with no cavity, built to take water in on the face and give it back through the joint. That works only while the mortar stays softer and more open than the brick. We rake out by hand to a depth of roughly twice the joint width, perpends as well as beds, damp the joints down and point back in a breathable lime, usually an NHL gauged against a sample of the original with the sand picked for grain and colour, then brush the face off once it has taken up. The finish goes back to whatever the wall carries, flush, recessed or bucket handle, rather than to whatever is quickest.

Cement pointing, and why it is often the cause. Where a wall has been pointed in a hard sand and cement mix at some point, the water leaves through the brick face instead of the joint and the face is what fails. The giveaway is joints that still look perfect standing proud of bricks that are spalling. Cutting that out without taking the arris off what is left is slow work with a chisel and a hacksaw blade, and a disc cutter or an angle grinder never goes near it.

Faces that have already blown. Once a face is off, every frost takes another layer, so the failed units come out whole and matched bricks go back in, handmade or reclaimed where the original has been out of production for a century. It is worst in the bottom few courses, in the reveals either side of a door, and anywhere a downpipe has been discharging down the wall for years.

Stacks and flaunching. Plenty of houses out this way still have a fire or a burner under the stack, and above the roof line it is exposed on four sides with nothing sheltering it. We repoint stacks, renew the cracked flaunching that beds the pots and make good the top courses where they have gone friable. Where a flue is genuinely finished with, it gets capped and left ventilated rather than sealed, so damp is not shut inside the brickwork.

Lane walls and copings. A free standing wall weathers from both faces at once and has no roof over it, so the coping is doing all the work. A loose or missing coping lets water straight into the core and the wall starts coming apart from the top. Rebedding coping and pointing the top courses, off a tower where the wall is low enough, is the cheapest useful thing you can do to one.

Outbuildings. A fair share of what we are asked to look at is not the house. A stable block, a workshop or an old outbuilding turned into a store, built lighter than the house in a softer brick, will show open joints and crumbling faces years before the main walls do.

No rate per square metre. The area tells you almost nothing until somebody has looked at the joints.

Getting to it. A cottage with the Forest right up to the gable, a stack on a two storey house set back behind trees and a low wall on a bend in the lane are three different set ups. A chimney or a gable wants a scaffold; a boundary wall wants nothing. The work at height rules are why access is a priced line rather than something absorbed into a rate.

The joints decide it, not the wall. How deep they come back, and whether the faces have spalled, sets the hours far more than the area does.

Matching is the part that shows. Lime is slower to work and slower to cure, and 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 was matched, how many spalled bricks are being replaced, and whether the scaffold is in the price.

We cover Minstead, Emery Down, Lyndhurst, Cadnam, Bartley and the SO43 villages, with the New Forest National Park Authority as the planning authority rather than a district council. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, trading name of Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, company number 15471719. Thomas Hannen's business, and he prices every job himself rather than sending a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are free.