Repointing and Brickwork Repairs in Bournemouth

Repointing is the job of raking out the old mortar between the bricks and putting new mortar back in its place. Mortar is meant to be softer than the brick around it, so it takes the weather first and wears out first. That's the joint doing exactly what it's there for. Once it has gone soft, hollow or missing in patches, water gets in behind the face of the wall instead of running off it, and from that point the brick starts to suffer instead of the mortar.

The signs are easy enough to spot from the ground. Mortar you can rake out with a screwdriver. Joints that have opened up or gone hollow. Green growth on the face of the wall, damp patches on the inside of an outside wall, and crumbs of loose mortar on the ground underneath. Frost is what turns a tired joint into a real problem: water sits in the open joint, freezes, expands and lifts the face off the brick. That's spalling, and once a brick has spalled, repointing on its own won't put it right. The brick has to come out and be replaced.

Repointing cost comes down to how much wall there is, how high it is, how hard the old mortar has gone and how much of it has to come out, so we don't put a figure on it until we've seen the wall. Every visit is free and comes with no obligation, and we give you the price in writing before anything starts. That figure is built from the time the job will actually take, not from a number that sounds competitive on a website: what it buys is the joint raked out to a proper depth rather than skimmed over, mortar matched to the wall for colour and finish, and a five-year workmanship guarantee sitting behind it.

Repointing is only half of what this page covers. The other half is the brickwork itself: cracked joints and sections of wall that have moved, spalled and frost-damaged faces, an old doorway or window that needs filling in and bringing back into line with the wall around it, and corroded cavity wall ties that have started to lift the courses above them. Chimney stacks take more weather than anything else on the house and usually need attention before the walls do. On older brickwork, a repair only works if it disappears, which is why brick matching and getting the bond right matter every bit as much as the mortar does.

One thing this page doesn't cover is lime mortar and heritage repointing. It's a specialism in its own right, and Jack would rather say so than take the work on and learn it on a listed building. Everything else on this page is work we do week in and week out.

We work across Dorset and into Hampshire, roughly an hour of driving from Ferndown, which takes in Bournemouth, Poole, Wimborne, Broadstone, Christchurch, Ferndown, Verwood, Ringwood, New Milton and Salisbury. If you've searched for repointing near me and ended up here, the useful thing to know is that the visit and the quote cost you nothing. Every one of our repointing services starts the same way: we come and look at the job, and you get a written price for it by the weekend.