I understand that my house was built/completed in 1977, so I assume that the detached single garage that comes with it also dates from around this time? The garage is of a fairly standard UK design, using single-skin stretcher bond brickwork and a gently sloping corrugated asbestos concrete roof. Whereas the construction of the house has proved to have been relatively sound, over the years I have spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to remedy defects with the garage! Thus far, I have had to deal with a leaky roof, a rotten window frame, a side-door frame that was not properly anchored to the brickwork, and failed pointing. (If I was 20 years younger and had the money to spare, the sensible course of action would be to have the top half of the garage rebuilt once I realised what I was dealing with!)
Around 25 years ago, it became clear that there was a significant problem with the top nine or ten mortar courses on the garage. The exterior mortar had become noticeably recessed from the surface of the bricks, and when touched it was like dust and would fall out of the wall in a worrying manner. It was little better on the inside, and had burst through the coat(s) of white paint? that had been applied sometime in the first 15 years of the garage’s existence. Thankfully, the lower dozen or so mortar courses appeared to be mainly sound and intact, both outside and in.
Now, it is said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and I was probably proof of that. I knew very little about brickwork and bricklaying, but I had been given a copy of “The Reader’s Digest Complete [sic.] DIY Manual”, printed in 1994. (The commercial and social Internet was still developing circa the turn of the millennium, so that was of no use…) I was already aware of the purpose of repointing, and it seemed like that was what I needed to do, and my book informed me that I needed to use a cement-sand mixture. Moreover, I should be able to buy a bag of ready-mixed mortar which would spare me the effort of mixing sand and cement myself.
So I went to the local builder’s supplier and bought a smallish bag of “Blue Hawk” dried mortar mix and a repointing trowel. (I figured I could improvise other tools I might need from off-cuts of wood.) I then raked out the topmost mortar course using a woodscrew driven into a scrap of 1” x 2” softwood, and mixed some replacement mortar according to the instructions on the bag. My first attempt at repointing was a bit messy, because the sand seemed quite coarse compared to the old mortar, and I didn’t achieve as tidy a finish as I had hoped.
When the repointing had set, the first thing I noticed was that the colour was wrong! Although there was no mention on the bag, the new mortar was distinctly reddish, and the original mortar was very pale cream in comparison — almost white. I was also not happy with the grittiness of it, and it seemed difficult to work. I thought that the reason the old mortar had failed after only a decade or so was because it was not “strong” enough to resist the weather and needed more binder. So I decided to make a stronger mortar by adding additional Portland Cement (I can’t now remember the proportion I decided on) and used dilute builder’s PVA as a plasticiser. Furthermore, my Reader’s DIY book had mentioned “weatherstruck” pointing, so I would attempt to use that too! (Even though the original was finished in “bucket handle” profile...)
My new mortar mix was easier to work with as I had hoped, and the additional cement effectively hid the red colour of the sand, so I was happy. I then spent most of my free time when the weather was fine over the next two summers and autumns, raking-out and repointing the upper nine or ten courses on three sides of the garage. (The fourth side is east-facing and forms part of my neighbour’s western boundary, and didn’t appear to have suffered the weather as badly.)
Once I had completed the exterior repointing, I made a start on the interior, but I barely managed two courses before stopping for the season. After that, I seemed to lose interest in finishing the inside; and then any further work was put to a more permanent stop after a tidy-up (not by me!) disposed of all my equipment and materials. And thus did two decades pass…
