Pointing & Maintenance in Birmingham

Brick Re-Pointing and Property Maintenance in Birmingham

The mortar between your bricks is sacrificial by design. It is meant to weather and erode slowly so the bricks themselves stay protected, which means that on Birmingham's older houses the pointing usually needs renewing long before anything else does. Once those joints go soft, crack or fall out, rain gets a clear path into the wall, and damp, frost damage and crumbling brick faces follow. J Dowd & Sons cut out the tired mortar and re-point with a colour-matched mix that restores both the weatherproofing and the look of the wall.

When pointing needs renewing

• Mortar joints that are recessed, sandy to the touch or have gaps and missing sections
• Damp patches appearing on internal walls with no obvious other cause
• Brick faces flaking or popping off, a sign frost is getting into the wall through the joints
• Loose, hollow-sounding pointing you can pick out with a screwdriver

The right mortar for the wall

This matters more than most people realise, especially on the city's stock of solid-wall Victorian and Edwardian terraces. Those walls were built with soft lime mortar that lets moisture move through and evaporate out. Re-pointing them in hard modern cement, as too many quick jobs do, seals the joints, traps water in the brick and forces it to escape through the brick face instead, which spalls and destroys the brick. We use breathable lime on heritage solid walls and the appropriate cement mix on newer cavity-wall homes, matched to your original mortar colour and texture so the repair is almost invisible.

Done cleanly

Raking out old mortar makes dust, so we grind the joints with dust-controlled tools and a tidy site routine rather than leaving your home and your neighbours coated in it. Where you want it, we can also clean the brickwork, tint to even out repairs and apply a breathable water-repellent seal that sheds rain without sealing the wall up.

The case for re-pointing now

Pointing is one of those jobs that is easy to keep putting off because the wall still looks more or less fine from the pavement. The trouble is that the moment the joints stop keeping water out, the clock starts on far more expensive damage. Frost gets into the wet brick over winter and blows the faces off, so instead of re-pointing you are eventually looking at cutting out and replacing whole bricks. Damp tracks inside and ruins plaster and decoration. Done in good time, re-pointing is a tidy, contained job that resets the weatherproofing of the whole elevation for decades. Left too long, it drags repair work into the bricks themselves.

Ongoing property maintenance

Re-pointing pairs naturally with looking after the rest of the building, and as a full roofing and building firm we are well placed to do both. Our maintenance plans cover an annual roofline and gutter inspection, a gutter clear, sealant renewal around windows and abutments, a brickwork health report and small masonry or timber repairs caught on the same visit. One planned yearly visit is far cheaper than the emergency call-outs that come from leaving small faults to grow. Every job is fully scaffolded and priced up front, and our re-pointing carries a written workmanship guarantee alongside a 20-year mortar durability warranty.