Hi I need to repoint the blue bricks at the base of my house. Can I use ordinary mortar for this? I am not concerned with preserving the heritage or anything like that (I have found some '5 lime' mortar for that purpose but it's for heritage buildings and costs more than twice as much as ordinary mortar!).
Thank you
Ps - sorry should have said - house is Victorian with suspended wooden floors, and there is an underfloor vent in the layers of engineering bricks.
By mortar do you mean cement? My manhole chambers are made with eng.bricks and ordinary cement, the grey stuff or OPC. Better to mix your own mortar I would say.
4:1 sand/cement plus a splodge of plasticiser eg., Feb-mix, or washing up liquid if it's only a small amount of mortar you are mixing.mark
1:1:6 would be fine
NT
sand and cement is fine, about 4:1, unless it's below the dpc, in which case you're better making it 3:1, and a minimum of 12mm deep
Sod heritage. Engineering bricks are used because they resist getting damp and spalling in frost.
So use good strong 2:1 mortar here!
If you want to match rubbish lime mortar color wise, use white cement.
2:1 with waterproofing additive below DPC. Let's not sod about here.;-)
Nothing wrong with line mortar, ask the Egyptians and Roman's, I'm pointing my 1908 Victorian house at the mo, nothing wrong with it if you do it properly
Before replying to a 10 year old post through a broken website read this first.
She must have been getting on a bit by them.
Bill
Also why is it called pointing? Surely all you are doing is making the joints between bricks look nicer and hopefully stopping it eroding more. Brian
The reason the process is called pointing - or repointing, in this case is because you use a pointed trowel. "
The trowel is diamond shaped and has a handle welded to one end of the diamond.
The pointing trowel is about half the length of the brick trowel. And the pointing trowel, you can bend the diamond portion of it if you're not careful. Whereas a brick trowel, the metal is a lot thicker.
Paul
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