Lime repointing in Sixpenny Handley

Late Victorian brick is solid wall. A good deal of the Sixpenny Handley 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.

Sixpenny Handley 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 instead of the weather struck or bucket handle finish you find on later work.

Getting cement out of a soft wall. Plenty of that Sixpenny Handley 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 Sixpenny Handley 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 Sixpenny Handley 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 Sixpenny Handley 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.

Repointing in Sixpenny Handley has no rate per square metre. You cannot know what a wall will take until someone has looked closely at the joints.

Setting up. A pair of Sixpenny Handley cottages sharing one chimney, an outbuilding behind a house, and a flint wall on a roadside bank all need different access. A chimney or gable needs a scaffold, and a low garden wall needs nothing. The work at height rules are why access has its own line.

The depth of the rake. Joints need raking back to sound mortar, usually around twice as deep as the joint is wide. Where old repairs were done in hard cement, it has to be cut out carefully without damaging the brick.

Lime and matching. A lime mortar is slower to mix, lay and cure than cement, and it needs protecting from frost and hot sun while it sets. On most walls built before the First World War it is the right mix. Matching the colour of the sand takes trial panels.

Spalled bricks. Each brick with its face gone is cut out and replaced with a matching one, and they are counted one by one.

When you compare quotes, ask how deep the joints will be raked and whether by hand, what mix is going in and how it was matched, and whether the scaffold is included.

From our base in Boscombe we travel 17.1 miles to Sixpenny Handley, and cover Pentridge, Woodyates, Tollard Royal and Cranborne too. Dorset Council is the planning authority. You deal with Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, company number 15471719, registered in England and Wales. Before you book a visit in Sixpenny Handley, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

The business belongs to Thomas Hannen, who prices every repointing job himself, so the person scratching at your joints is the one who writes the quote. We hold a verified 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The site visit and the written, itemised quote cost you nothing.

Most repairs in Sixpenny Handley 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.