Property Maintenance in Oxted (RH8)
Oxted's town centre holds terraces and houses built before 1900, and brick of that age was made and laid to different rules. One of the surest ways to damage a wall like that is not weather or neglect. It is repointing it in a mortar harder than the brick itself.
Why the mortar has to be softer than the brick
An old solid wall is meant to move a little and to let moisture out.
The mortar joint is the sacrificial part: it weathers, it takes the movement, and every fifty or eighty years somebody rakes it out and replaces it. That only works while the mortar is softer than the brick. Point a soft handmade brick wall in a strong modern cement mix and the joint becomes the hardest thing in the wall, so the movement and the moisture come out through the face of the brick instead. You get spalled faces, crumbling edges and a wall that looks worse ten years after repointing than it did before. The repair is slower than it looks: rake out to a proper depth by hand where the brick is soft, brush out, wet down, and fill in a mix matched to what was there.
What a repointing job should look like when it is finished
Two things give away a poor job. One is the mix, which shows as a colour that never settles into the wall. The other is the joint profile — a joint struck flush and smeared across the brick faces reads as a band of mortar rather than as brickwork, and once it is done there is no undoing it without taking it all out again. Getting it right means matching the sand, the binder and the finish to the original, and doing test areas before a whole elevation goes ahead. It is also worth being honest about how much of a wall genuinely needs it. A whole-house repoint is not always necessary, and where it is only the exposed faces and the worst bays that have gone, that is what should be priced. Raking out and pointing is our own bricklayers' work; roofing, electrics and decorating are specialist trades we bring in and stay answerable for.
Rural property, boundary walls and outbuildings
Out towards the Downs and the villages the properties are larger and there is more to look after than the house.
Garden and boundary walls, outbuildings and garaging all weather harder than a sheltered elevation, and the coping or cap along the top is the part that has to keep working. A free-standing wall takes water from both sides and from above, so the top of it fails first, and a sound coping is worth more to it than anything else you can spend money on.
More in Oxted
Everything we do in Oxted is on the Oxted area sheet, and the full detail of how we approach this trade is on the building maintenance page.
Common questions
Q.01How do I know if my house was repointed in the wrong mortar?
Look at the brick faces rather than the joints. If the mortar stands slightly proud and the brick faces are crumbling or flaking back behind it, the mix was too hard for the wall it went into.
Q.02Does the whole house need repointing?
Usually not. Exposed elevations and the areas under a failed gutter go first, and it is fair to price those and leave the rest. We will say plainly which parts need doing now and which have years left in them.
Q.03Can old brickwork be cleaned or sealed?
Sealing an old solid wall is rarely a good idea, because it traps moisture that used to escape. If a wall is wet, the answer is to find where the water is getting in rather than to coat over it.
Q.04Do you cover the villages around Oxted as well as the town?
Yes. We are at 27 High Street, Godstone, along the A25, and we work across the RH8 area including the outlying properties. Ring 01883 337 700 for a visit and a written price.
Thinking about building maintenance in Oxted?
Tell us what you are planning. We come out, look at the job properly and give you a price for it.