Pointing and repointing is work we advertise across the board, and across Chesterfield and north Derbyshire it's one of the most common jobs the housing stock needs. The mortar holding your ridges, verges, chimney stacks and stonework together has a working life, and a lot of the older property round here is now past it.
What Pointing Does and Why It Fails
Pointing is the mortar between your bricks and stones, and the bedding that holds your ridge and verge tiles in place. It keeps wind-driven rain out of the joints and holds the covering on. It fails through freeze-thaw cycling — water gets in, freezes, and pushes the mortar out — through shrinkage if the original mix was wrong, and through simple age. A typical pointing lifespan is 20 to 30 years; the ridge pointing on an older roof can fail sooner.
This matters more than people think. Failed ridge pointing is the single most common roof defect flagged in RICS homebuyer surveys, and across the stone-built cottages and terraces of the former pit villages — Clay Cross, North Wingfield, Pilsley — much of the original pointing has simply reached the end of its life. The good news is it's straightforward to put right, done properly with the right mortar.
The choice of mortar is the whole game on pointing. Lime mortar is softer and breathable — it lets moisture out of the wall and flexes with the building. On the older stone-built property across Bolsover and the Peak fringe, lime is almost always the right answer.
Cement mortar is harder and less breathable — fine on newer brickwork, but a real problem on soft stone. A hard cement mix on soft stone traps moisture and causes the stone faces to spall off — the mortar stays hard while the stone around it crumbles. We've seen plenty of properties ruined by a previous "repointing" in the wrong mortar, and we won't add to it.
For ridges and verges, we re-bed in a sound sand-and-cement mix and finish the pointing to shed water. On chimney stacks we use the mortar that suits the brickwork — often lime on older stacks. The principle is always the same: the mortar serves the building, not the other way round.
Repointing is priced on the area and the access. Ridge and verge re-bedding on a typical semi falls between £250 and £500. Repointing a chimney stack, with scaffolding, runs £300–£600. Full wall or gable stonework repointing is priced per square metre — roughly £40–£70 per square metre depending on the stone, the joint and the access, with scaffolding an additional real cost where it's needed.
The honest point about cost is this: the wrong mortar is cheap to lay and expensive to live with. A cement repoint on soft stone will start spalling the brickwork within a few years and cost far more to put right than doing it properly once. We quote the right mortar, the right depth of raking, and scaffolding where it's genuinely needed — all in writing before we start. Call 07949 348947 for a free, no-obligation quote.
