Pointing - is this sufficient quality?

[livingstoned]

A friend asked me to look at some REPAIR pointing.
She has a dispute over what was agreed to be done which I can't comment on , except to say the self-proclaimed Brick expert should have given a written quote to prevent that. He was there half the time he said it would take etc etc, and he wants £500 for 4 hours attendance. It's a few square feet around a porch. It would have taken me, an amateur who's done it a few times, no more than that

But the quality of the work looks unacceptable to me
It's a 30's semi, no cavities, so the mortar would have been lime and sand.

He went to great length about the need to use lime and not Portland cement.
The original pointing was off-white, not at all yellowish, and in most places only a few mm thick.
This is a piece from the original. The orange brick chip by the thumb is obviously the brick side:

:.
He clearly used yellow sand - I'd have tried silver sand, which round here comes a very light grey
In places he put new pointing over existing
It was supposed to be Weather Struck pointing, but it's poor impression of that-
Much of it is all above the face of the brick- not really shown here
He's smeared it across the bricks,
He's not cleared out any of the old white pointing so it's all patchy
Some of it he apparently did after dark, so he couldn't see what he was leaving.


This is the best part, but the match....

Done after dark!

Yellow blobs!

Yuk?

 

[Koolpc]

Is he colour blind and did he use his feet?

 

[noseall]

A friend asked me to look at some REPAIR pointing.
She has a dispute over what was agreed to be done which I can't comment on , except to say the self-proclaimed Brick expert should have given a written quote to prevent that. He was there half the time he said it would take etc etc, and he wants £500 for 4 hours attendance. It's a few square feet around a porch. It would have taken me, an amateur who's done it a few times, no more than that

But the quality of the work looks unacceptable to me
It's a 30's semi, no cavities, so the mortar would have been lime and sand.

He went to great length about the need to use lime and not Portland cement.
The original pointing was off-white, not at all yellowish, and in most places only a few mm thick.
This is a piece from the original. The orange brick chip by the thumb is obviously the brick side:
View attachment 411014
:.
He clearly used yellow sand - I'd have tried silver sand, which round here comes a very light grey
In places he put new pointing over existing
It was supposed to be Weather Struck pointing, but it's poor impression of that-
Much of it is all above the face of the brick- not really shown here
He's smeared it across the bricks,
He's not cleared out any of the old white pointing so it's all patchy
Some of it he apparently did after dark, so he couldn't see what he was leaving.


This is the best part, but the match....
View attachment 411016

Done after dark!
View attachment 411011


Yellow blobs!

View attachment 411015


Yuk?

View attachment 411013

The original mortar would have been a unique blend of materials available at the time. It looks like there was lime in there too.

Whilst it can be difficult to replicate original weathered pointing, you can strive to make pointing a little less obvious. If it was a one off, we would have taken a few different bags of sand available to us (we have a few) and found the nearest match.
If you went to B&Q and had a choice of either red or yellow, you are always going to struggle.

 

[stuart45]

Back in the 30's it was quite popular to rake out the joints on new builds, and point them up at the end using that weather struck and cut style.
They got the white colour by gauging white cement into the mortar mix, instead of the normal grey. White cement came into common use in the 30's from Denmark.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

She has a dispute over what was agreed to be done which I can't comment on , except to say the self-proclaimed Brick expert should have given a written quote to prevent that. He was there half the time he said it would take etc etc, and he wants £500 for 4 hours attendance.

That is not pointing, and very expensive for that amount of work, even if properly done. Did she get him from a 'Checkatrade' type site?

 

[stuart45]

That is not pointing, and very expensive for that amount of work, even if properly done. Did she get him from a 'Checkatrade' type site?

Agree with this 100%. To get a good colour match the first thing to do is put a sample of the existing mortar in brick acid, and this will leave you with a sample of the original. Where the bricks were slightly chipped, a coloured red mortar should be used to match the bricks, not filled with the ordinary mortar.
For Weather struck and cut pointing, the method is different to Weather struck. Weather struck is done as the work proceeds with a pointing trowel, and is angled down so the bottom edge is flush with the top edge of the brick.
With Weather struck and cut the bottom edge of the bed joints protrude slightly, and the edge is cut off using a straight edge and a knife taken from the local cafe and bending over the end.
The bed joints in the photo were cut off with the pointing trowel while still wet, which is why they are not straight and mortar stains have been scraped down the brickwork.
This might sound a bit picky, but for £500 there's enough cash there for a high quality job. It's the sort of cash you'd expect to pay a firm to send out a time served bricklayer to do allowing for him to stop for breakfast on the way from the office in the morning.
I could of done that job for half of that and still done well out of it.