Repointing across the Redlynch parish

Solid brick and flint, pointed in lime. Better than a quarter of the housing in this parish predates 1919: solid walls one brick thick with no cavity, often with flint coursed in below the first floor. A wall like that sheds water by letting it evaporate back out through the joint, which only works while the mortar stays softer and more open than the brick. We rake those out by hand with a hacking iron and a plugging chisel, back to about twice the joint width and no further, damp the joint down, and point back in a natural hydraulic lime with a sand matched to the original for colour and grain. Lime is graded under BS EN 459, and on soft handmade brick the softer grades are usually right. The finish goes back flush or very slightly recessed.

Taking a hard repoint back out. Plenty of walls here were pointed in sand and cement in the seventies and eighties. It still looks sound, and that is the problem: the joint has become the one part of the wall water cannot leave through, so it leaves through the brick face instead and one frost after another lifts the surface off. If your joints look better than your bricks, this is what you have. The repair is slow, because the cement has to come out without taking the arris with it.

Post-war outer skins in a gauged cement mix. Getting on for half of the parish went up between 1945 and the early eighties: cavity work, a single skin of fired brick struck weather or bucket handle. The joint does not wash out so much as pit and open at the arris, water stands in it, and a hard frost takes the surface off in flakes. Matching that means matching the gauge as well as the sand.

The seam where the two meet. Half the houses we look at here are a period core with something added: a rebuilt gable, a sixties extension, a garage tied on the end. That junction is where the pointing fails first, and we point either side of it in what belongs there.

Blown faces, cut out rather than filled. Where a face has gone we cut the brick out whole and turn or replace it against a sample held on the wall, with a trial panel you look at in daylight. Filling the hollow with mortar leaves a patch that never matches and drops out in a couple of winters.

Stacks and the top courses. A stack takes weather on four sides with nothing warming it from inside, so its joints go friable long before anything at ground level. Repointing above the flashing, cutting out perished brick and renewing the flaunching round the pots is usually the whole job.

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 brick and flint cottage straight on the lane, a post-war detached house set back behind its drive and a bungalow whose gable doubles as the boundary are three different set ups before a chisel comes out. The work at height rules are why the scaffold is a priced line, not 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.

What catches people out here is that a single property often needs two specifications. The housing splits fairly evenly between the pre-1919 cottages through Redlynch, Woodfalls and Morgan's Vale and the post-war detached houses and bungalows, and many buildings sit on both sides of that line. One mortar cannot serve both. Lime in a modern cavity skin is too weak for that exposure, and a cement mix in a solid wall stops it drying and starts taking the brick faces off.

What that changes is what you ask for. Do not accept a quote naming one mix for the whole house. Ask for the mortar elevation by elevation, with the old fabric and the newer work priced separately, and ask what goes into the joint where the two meet, because that seam moves with the seasons and is where the pointing lets go first. We break it out that way as a matter of course, and where a wall is borderline we make up a sample panel on the quiet side and let you look at it first.

We cover Redlynch, Woodfalls, Morgan's Vale and Lover, out towards Hale and Downton, broadly the SP5 villages on the western edge of the forest, all of it under Wiltshire Council. 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.