Repointing brickwork in Minstead

Solid wall cottages. The older houses in Minstead 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.

On a Minstead wall 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 Minstead 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 in Minstead 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 Minstead lane 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. In Minstead the wall that needs pointing is often 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.

We never price by the square metre, because until somebody has looked at the joints, the area of a wall tells you very little.

Access. A Minstead cottage with the trees right up to the gable, a chimney stack on a house set back from the lane, and a low wall on a bend each need a different set up. A stack or a gable wants a scaffold; a boundary wall wants none. The work at height rules make access its own line.

Depth and damage. How far back the joints have to be raked, and how many brick faces have spalled, sets the hours more than the square metres do. Old cement pointing is slow to cut out without breaking the arris.

The mortar. Lime is slower to mix, slower to point and slower to cure than cement, and on a soft pre-1919 brick wall it is the right material because it lets the wall breathe. Matching sand colour and lime strength to what is there, to the building lime standard, is part of the price.

Replacing bricks. A spalled face has to be cut out and replaced with a brick that matches, and reclaimed bricks take time to find.

When you compare, ask how deep the joints are raked and whether 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 point walls in Minstead, Emery Down, Lyndhurst, Cadnam, Bartley and the other SO43 villages, 15.6 miles up from our base in Boscombe. Planning sits with the New Forest National Park Authority, not a district council.

Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is the company, registered in England and Wales with the number 15471719. Thomas Hannen owns it and prices every repointing job after looking at the joints himself. There is a verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. You pay nothing for the visit or for the written quote, which is itemised. Before you book a visit in Minstead, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Minstead 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.