Chimneys & leadwork in Boldmere

Boldmere is a leadwork town. The Victorian and Edwardian terraces off Boldmere Road were built with chimney stacks sitting on the party walls, which means the stack above your bedroom is also the stack above your neighbour's. When it starts letting water in, the damp appears in one house and the cause belongs to both. We deal with this most weeks.

What we take off these stacks, over and over, is cement. At some point it became normal to seal a chimney to a slate roof with a triangular fillet of sand and cement rather than lead. On soft Victorian brick that is doubly wrong: it cracks, because cement and brick move at different rates, and the hard mix chews the faces off the brick it is stuck to. The proper job is individual soakers between every course, a stepped flashing let into the mortar joints and wedged, and a back gutter behind the stack. It is slower. It lasts sixty years instead of six.

The pointing question matters just as much on this stock. A hard modern cement mortar on soft Victorian brick will quietly destroy the brick over a couple of decades — the mortar ends up stronger than the masonry, so the brick face spalls instead of the joint. We mix for the brick in front of us. On a Boldmere stack that generally means something softer and more forgiving than whatever was in the last man's van.

And because the stack is shared, we will talk to your neighbour. Before the scaffold, not during. Scaffolding a shared stack twice because two households could not have one conversation is the most avoidable expense in this trade.