Lime repointing in Sixpenny Handley

Late Victorian solid brick. A good deal of the village centre is solid wall brick with no cavity behind it, bedded in a soft mortar that usually had lime in it as well as anything else. Walls like that shed water by letting it evaporate back out of the joint, so the joint has to stay softer and more open than the brick. We rake out by hand with a chisel and a hacksaw blade to a depth of about twice the joint width, take the perpends as well as the beds, damp the joints down before filling and brush them back once the mix has taken up. The profile goes back to whatever the wall carries, usually flush or slightly recessed rather than the weather struck or bucket handle finish you find on later work.

Getting cement out of a soft wall. Plenty of that brickwork has been repointed in sand and cement since. Once the joints are sealed the moisture leaves through the brick face instead, and one hard frost up here takes the faces off while the pointing still looks perfect. Cutting that out without damaging what is left is slow hand work, and it is the only repair that actually fixes the cause rather than the symptom.

Flint with brick quoins and lacing courses. The older walling in the parish is flint rubble through the body with brick at the corners, around the openings and in courses running through to level it up. Flint has almost no bond of its own, so the lime is doing all the work, and once the head of the wall lets water in the flints loosen from the top down. We take out what has worked free, rebed it in a fat lime, gallet the joints with small chips the way the wall was built and put the coping back so the top sheds water instead of holding it.

Faces that have spalled. Once the face is off a brick, each frost takes another layer. We cut the unit out whole and bed a matched replacement in rather than filling the hollow with mortar, which never matches and drops out in a couple of winters. It goes worst under cills, beside downpipes and in the bottom few courses where a path has been laid up against the wall.

Stacks and flaunching. A stack has weather on four sides and a cold flue up the middle, so it goes friable long before the walls do, and open joints up there put water into a roof space rather than onto a wall. Repointing above the roof line, cutting out perished brick and renewing the cracked flaunching around the pots is a single visit if it is planned as one, and three visits if it is not.

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

Getting to it. A pair of cottages sharing one stack, an outbuilding in a yard behind a house and a flint wall standing on a roadside bank are three different set ups before a joint is opened. 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 Sixpenny Handley, Pentridge, Woodyates, Cranborne, Tollard Royal and the rest of SP5, with Dorset Council as the planning authority. 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.