Can I render this part of the house?

[Tirglas_7]

Hi

Renovating an 80's house and looking for options on improving some poor brickwork and awful repointing done on the front of the house.

The house is built on a slope with the garage/lowest floor (the problem area) sticking out from the front of the house, this provides a balcony where the front door is located.

The brickwork isnt great, but for some reason someone has tried to repoint the top few courses of brick with red mortar. To make things even worse they've done a terrible job smearing the mortar all over the bricks (which have a rough surface finish so no way of removing as far as I can see).

So I'm looking at options to improve/mask this bodge job by potentially rendering the area where the garage door is below the balcony

Would I be able to cover in K rend or similar? If so roughly what kind of costs are involved?

If I do go down the render route will I have to replace the coping stones to provide more overhang?

Any other options that could work?

Here's a couple of pics, the one with the scaffold is an older pic when we were having the roof replaced

IMG_20170611_190000013_HDR

• Tirglas_7
• 2 Sep 2018

20180325_160758

• Tirglas_7
• 2 Sep 2018

Many thanks

 

[Bonni]

I'm a bricklayer and avoid render, dreadful future maintenance stuff.

The red mortar (mortar with Febtone) was put in too wet, hence the bricks being smudged. Personally, I would rake out with my Irwin mortar rake, brick acid mortar smudging off and repoint.

 

[opps]

A friend of mine is a pointer that's all he does (London based though, sorry).

He would use (trade only) acids to remove the mortar on the brick faces and then pressure wash them before re-pointing.

See if you can find a local brick pointer that might be willing to swing by and give you a price. It may work out much more expensive than rendering though.