Repointing and mortar matching in West Parley

Bungalow brickwork, and why it is a different job. More than a third of the homes in West Parley are bungalows, and a bungalow presents a long, low run of wall with almost all of it inside reach of a tower or trestles. That takes the biggest single cost out of a quote, since a scaffold is only needed for the stack. It also puts the whole elevation at eye level, so a poor colour match or a sloppy joint profile is on show in a way it never is on a two storey house. We agree the finish first and strike it to whatever is already there, usually bucket handle or weather struck on this stock.

The base of the wall. The commonest job we do here is the bottom four or five courses, where ground levels have crept up over fifty years of patios, block paving and borders. Wet joints go friable, then hollow, then wash out, and the salts carried up with the damp crystallise in the mortar and break it apart. We rake out to about twice the joint width, damp the joints down, fill, and brush the face back once the mix has taken up. Where the ground is bridging the damp proof course we say so, because pointing without dropping that level is a repair with a short life.

Sixties and seventies cavity work. Nearly six in ten homes here went up between 1945 and 1982, peaking in the late sixties and early seventies: fired brick, cavity built, in a cement and sand mortar. Those joints do not wash out the way lime does. They erode at the arris until water stands in them, then frost lifts the mortar and takes brick faces with it, which is the spalling you see under sills and at the corners of a bay. Blown faces are cut out and replaced rather than filled, matched on a sample off the wall and a trial panel you look at first.

Stacks, and the little bit of solid wall that is left. A bungalow chimney is short, squat and exposed on all four sides, with nothing warming it from inside. Its joints go long before the house does, and a stack repoint with the flaunching renewed is a proper access job even on a single storey building. A small number of properties around the older lanes are pre-1919 solid wall rather than cavity, and those want an NHL lime or lime putty mix instead, because a solid wall has to stay breathable. We work out which you have on the visit.

Garden and boundary walls. Front walls, dividing walls between drives and the low walls around a raised patio take weather on both faces with nothing to shelter them. Open coping joints let rain into the core, which then freezes. Repointing the coping and the exposed face, and cutting out the frost damaged bricks, is short work that saves a rebuild.

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

Getting to it. A detached bungalow you can work off a tower, a chalet bungalow with a dormer gable and a boundary wall between two drives are three quite different set ups before a joint is touched. The work at height rules are why access is its own priced line.

The joints decide it, not the wall. Raking out by hand is slow, and on soft brick the only safe way: a disc widens the joint and takes the arris off. Depth, and whether faces have already spalled, sets the hours far more than 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 cures slower, and suits most pre-1919 walls here.

Comparing quotes? Ask how deep the joints are raked and by what, what the mix is, how many spalled bricks come out, and whether the scaffold is in the price. Two quotes for the same job are usually two different jobs.

West Parley sits on low ground on the north side of the Stour, and although the housing is not in the river flood zones, surface water risk across the area is rated high. Check your own address on the government flood risk service. In practical terms that means water sits on the surface after heavy rain rather than draining away quickly, and where it sits is against the bottom of your walls.

What that changes is the mix at low level, not just the timing. The temptation on a wall that keeps going soft at the base is to point it in the hardest mortar available. That traps moisture in the brick and pushes the damage upward: the water and the dissolved salts leave through the faces above and blow them off. On a wall with wet ground against it we point the plinth in a slightly softer mix than the brick, do not seal it, and tell you where the water is coming from first. Often the useful money goes on lowering a bed, cutting a gravel margin or fixing a gully rather than on mortar at all, and we would rather say that on a free visit than take the job twice.

We work across West Parley, Parley Cross, Dudsbury, Longham and Ferndown, broadly BH22, under Dorset 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 prices every job himself. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written itemised quote are free.