Restoration masonry · Ashbourne Vale · since 1979
We will not point a 1904 wall with 2026 mortar.
Services & rates
Rates, honestly
Quoted after the survey, held for sixty days. Lime, labor, scaffolding and cleanup are IN the number — the only extra is brick we have to buy, quoted per thousand before you approve.
Lime repointing$18–$24/sq ft
hand-raked joints · NHL 3.5 matched to your chip
Brick repair & swap-out$22/sq ft
salvaged brick matched by era · bedded in lime
Stone wall rebuild$38/sq ft
numbered, dismantled, re-laid in original order
Chimney rebuild & relinefrom $3,400
crown, flue tile, cap — draw-tested at the end
Forty-seven years of refusal
The ledger
What we do
What restoration means here
The repoint, by hand
Joints raked to twice their width with chisels — never a grinder, which burns the arris and bricks the brick — then flushed full in two passes with lime matched to the chip from your wall. Struck to the original profile: flush, weather-struck or bucket-handle, whatever the wall was born with.
Rebuilds, numbered
When a wall must come down, every stone is numbered, diagrammed and re-laid in its original position, with new through-stones where the old wall had none. The wall comes back. It does not get replaced by a wall that merely looks like it.
Foundations & retaining
Bowed and buckled stone foundations straightened or rebuilt, pointed underneath and drained behind — the water problem fixed before the masonry that was hiding it is made beautiful again. Sequence is the whole trade.
How it goes
Survey to cure
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Visit one
The survey
A mortar chip comes out of an inconspicuous joint and gets matched. You receive a written square-foot price and a start window, held for sixty days — the age of your wall sets the lime, and the chip sets the color.
Day 1–3
Rake & prep
Scaffolding up, sheets down, joints raked by hand to twice their width and vacuumed clean. Depth is verified joint by joint before any new mix is batched — shallow raking is how walls fail behind beautiful mortar.
Day 4–10
Repoint
NHL 3.5 flushed in two passes, waiting between them for the first to stiffen — the pace of lime, not the pace of portland. Struck to the original profile and brushed at the leather-hard stage so the joint reads old from across the street.
Weeks 3–6
Cure & warrant
Lime gains strength against carbon dioxide, slowly, over weeks — misted in heat, covered against frost. At week six we return, strike the twenty-five-year warranty into your name, and take the scaffolding away for the last time.
Lime cures against the calendar, not the thermostat — repointing runs April to October, and the fall schedule is usually full by mid-August. The survey, however, is a year-round visit.
Send us the wall.
Year built, what is failing, a photo if you can manage one. A survey visit and a written square-foot number follow within the week — oldhollow@tuckpointing.example answers between them.