Repointing in Sandleheath, old walls and soft mortar

Telling an old wall from a later one. Four things give it away and none of them needs a ladder. The bond: an older solid wall usually shows headers as well as stretchers in the pattern, a cavity wall shows stretchers only. The brick: handmade brick is uneven in size and colour with a soft arris, later brick is regular and hard. The joint width: old joints are wide and often flush or recessed, later ones are narrow and weather struck or bucket handle. And the reveal: on a solid wall the window sits close to the outside face. We check all four and tell you which you have before we say a word about mix.

Solid walls, in lime. Where the wall turns out to be solid there is no cavity behind the brick, and the only way it sheds water is by soaking it up and letting it evaporate back out through the joint. It has to stay breathable, so the mortar must be softer and more open than the brick. Joints come out by hand to roughly twice their width, no angle grinder, and go back in an NHL lime or lime putty mix gauged to the original sand for colour and grain. They are damped down before filling and brushed back once the mix has taken up, and the profile goes back to what the wall already carries.

Hard pointing on a soft wall, and taking it off. This is the biggest single job type here. A cement joint on a period brick stops the wall drying through the mortar, so the water goes out through the brick faces instead and frost takes them off. The tell is joints standing proud and hard with hollowed bricks between them, and there is good published work behind it in the research on lime and cement in traditional mortars. It comes out joint by joint with hand tools, because the cement is often stronger than the brick it is bonded to, and it shows as its own line on the quote because it is slower than pointing a wall nobody has touched.

Post-war cavity brickwork. Close to four homes in ten here went up between 1945 and 1982, and that is a single outer skin of fired brick in a cement and sand mortar. It fails at the arris rather than washing out: the joint pits, water starts to stand in it, and a hard frost lifts the face off the brick. Matching means matching the sand and the gauge as well as the colour, and a trial panel goes up somewhere discreet for you to look at in daylight, judged on how it will read weathered rather than fresh.

Blown faces. Where a brick face has gone we cut the brick out whole and turn or replace it against a sample held on the wall, rather than filling the hollow with mortar. Frost damage collects in the same places every time: under sills, beside downpipes, at the corners of a bay and in the courses just above the damp proof course where a drive or a border has been laid up against the house.

Stacks, low walls and outbuildings. A chimney weathers on four sides with nothing warming it from inside, so its joints go friable long before the house walls, and sand in the gutter is usually the first sign. Freestanding walls take weather on two faces and along the top, and the coping is nearly always what has failed. Both are quick work caught early. The stack is work at height and wants a scaffold rather than a tower, which is why it is worth doing everything up there in one visit.

No rate per square metre, because the square metres tell you almost nothing until somebody has looked at the joints.

Getting to it. A pre-war cottage on the lane, a fifties semi with a gable you can reach off a tower and a low wall along the road are three different set ups. How long the platform stands matters as much as how big it is, and the work at height rules are why access is a priced line rather than one absorbed into a rate.

The joints decide it, not the wall. Raking out by hand is slow, and on soft brick it is the only safe way. How deep the joints 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: cement holds water against a soft brick and the face blows off in the first hard frost. Lime is slower to work and to cure, and it is the right answer on most pre-1919 walls.

Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs, so ask each one how deep the joints are raked and whether the scaffold is in the price.

We cover Sandleheath, Fordingbridge, Alderholt, Damerham and the lanes along this side of the Avon valley, broadly SP6, under New Forest District Council. You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. 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.