Ivy off, and the bottom eight courses came with it
Nineteen metres down the side boundary, one brick thick, twenty-two courses to a brick-on-edge coping, put up in the early 1930s when the houses were. The ivy came off in March and took most of the north face with it. For the first eight courses the mortar is the colour and the consistency of dry sand: a car key goes in past the second knuckle under thumb pressure and comes out with a small heap of it. Two bricks have lost their faces. Above head height, on the same day, the same wall resists a plugging chisel.
The reflex is to price the whole elevation, and it is wrong in two directions at once. The sound two-thirds does not need touching, and raking it would take a wall that is doing its job and hand it a week of open joints and a mortar it never asked for. More usefully, the failure has a shape: it stops at a height, it is far worse on the shaded face, and it is worst at the bottom. That is a description of a wall being fed water from below, not of mortar that simply got old. Pointing the band without dealing with what is wetting it buys about six winters.
So the order of decisions runs: what is feeding it, how far the dead mortar actually goes back, what the new mortar has to be made of, what it has to look like, and whether any part of this wall has gone past the point where pointing is the answer at all. Quantity comes last, because every one of those five decisions changes it. The band being repaired here comes out at roughly a third of the joint in the wall, and a third is a number that only exists after the diagnosis.
One wall, three failures, wearing the same face
Three quite different things produce a joint you can pick out with a finger. Weathering is the mortar losing its surface to a century of rain and freeze cycles, deepest where the wall is most exposed; the material behind it still works. Saturation failure is the mortar being permanently wet, so frost works on it every clear night in January and salts crystallise in it every dry spell in July; that one goes back through the joint and takes the arrises of the bricks with it. Movement is a wall that has gone somewhere — a settled footing, a root, a leaning bay — and opened its joints doing it. Repointing answers the first, is money wasted without drainage work on the second, and is actively misleading on the third, because it hides the evidence a structural opinion would want to see.
The height at which the damage stops is the cheapest diagnostic on the job. A free-standing wall has no heated side and no roof; it wets from both faces and dries from both, and a great many were built with no damp-proof course at all, or with one since buried when somebody raised the border against it. If the band of failure runs level along the whole wall and stops at the same height on both faces, the ground is feeding it. If it stops at a height on one face only, look at what is stacked, planted or paved against that face. If it is confined to two metres in the middle of nineteen, the cause is local, and it is usually a downpipe, a gully or a tree.
Movement is separated from erosion by which way a crack travels. A crack that steps through the bed and head joints has followed the weakest path in a wall whose mortar is softer than its bricks, which is the wall behaving as designed; find the cause, but it is repointable once the cause has stopped. A crack running straight through the bricks means the mortar was harder than the units and the wall had nowhere to go, and pointing does nothing at all. A bay out of plumb, or a coping gone from level to a visible dip, has a stability question underneath it.
None of this takes more than a morning. Plumb every pier and the middle of every bay and write the readings down. Straightedge the top of the coping. Run a plugging chisel along a bed joint at four heights on both faces, recording where the mortar starts pushing back. Then dig one small hole at the base of the worst section to find the footing, any damp course, and what the finished ground is doing relative to it. That hole is frequently the whole answer, and it is dug with a trowel.
| What you can see | What it usually is | Does repointing address it |
|---|---|---|
| Soft joint to 3-6 mm, worse on the weather face, sound behind | Ordinary weathering of an old mortar | Yes, and this is the job it is for |
| Band of dead joint stopping level at the same height both faces | Ground water, no damp course or a buried one | Not on its own; lower the ground or drain it first |
| Spalled brick faces and white bloom in the same band | Salt and frost cycling in permanently wet masonry | Only after the wetting stops, and some units will need cutting out |
| Stepped crack following the joints | Movement the mortar has absorbed as intended | Yes, once the cause has been found and stopped |
| Crack running straight through the bricks | Mortar harder than the units, movement with nowhere to go | No. That is a repair to the units and a cause to find |
| Bay out of plumb, coping line dipped | Stability, footing or roots | No, and pointing it removes the evidence |
How deep, and what you rake it with
The working rule that survives contact with real walls is the one NPS Preservation Brief 2, Repointing Mortar Joints in Historic Masonry Buildings, sets out: cut back to roughly two to two and a half times the joint width, so the new mortar has enough section and enough bonded surface to survive. Ten millimetre joints therefore want somewhere near twenty-five. Below that you are skimming, and a skim over old mortar pops out within a few winters and brings the brick arris with it. Above it you gain very little and start removing bedding the wall is standing on. The other thing not to do is widen: whatever width you cut is the width that wall has forever.
How you cut it matters more here than on almost any other repointing job, because a garden wall is the one people do themselves and an angle grinder is the tool in the shed. A 115 mm grinder in a bed joint on brickwork whose gauge drifts three or four millimetres a course will oversail into the units, leave a kerf above and below every joint, and cut the arrises off in a way no pointing hides — you can read a grinder-raked wall from the far end of a garden. It also generates respirable crystalline silica: OSHA 29 CFR 1926.1153 gives handheld grinders used for mortar removal their own entry with required controls and respiratory protection, and in Great Britain the exposure sits under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations, with trigger time under the Control of Vibration at Work Regulations 2005. A plugging chisel and a lump hammer are slower, and they are what the wall wants.
- Take one bay at a time, from the top of the affected band downward, so debris falls onto joints you have not cut yet rather than into ones you have.
- Cut the head joints before the bed joints. Chiselling a perpend after the beds above and below have been opened is how a brick gets levered loose.
- Work to a square-ended joint of consistent depth, not a V. A tapered cut leaves the new mortar thin exactly where it is most exposed.
- Stop where the chisel meets resistance if that is shallower than your target, and record where it happened. Sound mortar is not a defect to be removed.
- Brush every joint out dry and then flush it, so the new mortar meets brick and old mortar rather than a bed of its own dust.
- Damp the joints before pointing, and damp them again on a thirsty brick. Initial rate of absorption is measured to ASTM C67 for exactly this reason, and a soft handmade brick and a hard machine-made one in the same wall will not behave alike.
- Point in bays you can finish and protect the same day, and never rake out more than that.
A third of the wall, counted band by band
This take-off is not an elevation area, because what is being repaired is not an elevation. It is a band on one face, a shorter band on the other, and a coping, and the honest way to count it is course by course. For 215 by 65 units on a 75 mm gauge, one metre of one course on one face carries one metre of bed joint plus the perpends: 4.44 of them, 65 mm tall, another 0.29 m. Call it 1.29 m of joint per course, per metre of run, per face, and everything else is multiplication. That figure is a stretcher face, which is what a garden-wall bond mostly shows; the occasional header course lifts it a few per cent, and a full English or Flemish face, with headers in every course, adds nearer ten. Bond changes it, and different units change it completely; the general per-square-metre version of that arithmetic belongs to the mortar estimating guide.
For the wall in question: the north face is dead for eight courses over the full nineteen metres, which is 8 x 19 x 1.29, about 196 m. The south face is dead for three courses, about 74 m. Then the coping, which everybody forgets and which is anything but small. A brick-on-edge cap sits with the 215 mm dimension across the wall and the 65 mm dimension along it, so there are thirteen cross joints to the metre, each of them 102.5 mm tall on both faces and 215 mm long across the top. Over nineteen metres that is a shade over 105 m, and the bed line under the cap adds another 38 m for the two faces. Call the coping 145 m of joint, in a strip that looks from the lawn like an afternoon.
That totals roughly 415 m of joint against about 1,220 m if the whole wall were repointed on both faces from footing to cap. At ten millimetres wide and twenty-five deep, 415 m is a little over 100 litres of mortar. It is a small enough number to be badly wrong in both directions, and it is provisional in one specific way: nobody can see the back of a joint from the front of it, so the length that survives raking will not be the length that was surveyed. Write it down as a figure to be confirmed rather than one to order against, and re-measure after the first bay is open.
| Band | Courses | Faces | Joint length |
|---|---|---|---|
| North face, base | 8 | 1 | 196 m |
| South face, base | 3 | 1 | 74 m |
| Coping bed and cross joints | Cap only | 2 faces and top | 145 m |
| Repair total | - | - | 415 m |
| Whole wall for comparison | 22 and cap | 2 | 1,220 m |
Length of joint actually being repaired, the width you are cutting to and the depth you are raking to. Feed it the band totals, not the whole wall, and re-run it once a bay has been opened.
The combined length of all deteriorated joints being repaired.
The width of the mortar joint.
How deep the old mortar is raked out before repointing.
Repair mortar needed
2.507 gal
- Equivalent in cubic meters
- 0.01 m³
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Tuckpointing Mortar Repair Volume Calculator: 2.51 gal — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- The volume is a plain rectangular prism: one width and one depth applied to the whole run. Deteriorated joints are not uniform — washed-out beds, voids behind the face and open collar joints in rubble stonework can take several times this figure, and you only find them once you start raking.
- It assumes you achieve the entered rake depth along the entire length. Where the existing mortar is still sound the rake stops shallower; around soft or friable units it runs deeper. Neither is reflected in the result.
- This is the mortar sitting in the finished joint, not the material you buy. It does not convert to bags of premix or to sand, lime and cement quantities — yield depends on the mix, sand bulking and what is lost to the board, the mixer and the scaffold — and it carries no waste allowance.
- Nothing here says what mortar to use. Binder type, strength and compatibility with the existing masonry decide whether the repair lasts or spalls the brick or stone, and on historic or lime-bound work that calls for mortar analysis and a conservation specification. A volume figure is not a mix specification.
- This is not a condition assessment. Cracking, bulging, displaced units, failed lintels, corroded wall ties and water getting in behind the face are not measured by joint volume, and repointing over a structural problem conceals it rather than repairing it.
Lime or cement is decided by what is already in the joint
The argument for a soft mortar is easier to make on a boundary wall than anywhere else on a property, because this wall has no dry side. A house wall can push moisture inward to a heated room. This one cannot: everything that gets in leaves through a face, and the only question is whether it leaves through the mortar, which is replaceable at a few pounds a metre, or through the bricks, which are not. Point a lime-built 1930s wall in a dense cement mortar and you have closed the cheap escape route and left the expensive one open, and the wall answers by shedding brick faces in the band that was already wet. On something saturated before every frost, that shows up inside a decade.
What it should not become is a reflex, because the opposite error exists and is just as expensive. A 1970s wall built in a strong cement mortar, on a proper concrete footing, with a damp course and hard machine-made bricks, is a system that works as it is; repointing it in a soft lime because lime is the conservation answer gives you a joint that erodes back to the line of the units in a few seasons and a client entitled to be annoyed. What decides it is the existing mortar and the existing brick, in that order.
There is a laboratory answer and there are field indications, and they are not the same thing. ASTM C1324, Standard Test Method for Examination and Analysis of Hardened Masonry Mortar, will name the binder and give you an aggregate to match on grading and colour, from a sample the size of a matchbox. The field indications narrow it and no more: mortar that crushes between finger and thumb into its own sand and releases the brick cleanly is behaving like a lime mortar; grey brittle material that fractures rather than crumbles and stays welded to the brick is behaving like a cement one. Resist the acid-fizz test as a decider, because carbonate is present in carbonated cement and in limestone-filled modern mortars too.
Once the binder type is settled, the specification belongs to documents rather than to habit. ASTM C1713, Standard Specification for Mortars for the Repair of Historic Masonry, is written for this material and is a different document from ASTM C270, which governs new work; in Europe the mortar sits under BS EN 998-2 and the lime itself under BS EN 459-1. Read the NHL designations there for what they are: NHL 2, NHL 3.5 and NHL 5 are compressive strength classes in megapascals, a laboratory property of the binder, not a ranking of how kind the finished mortar will be to your particular bricks. Historic England's Practical Building Conservation volume on Mortars, Renders and Plasters carries the practice around hydraulic, non-hydraulic and hot-mixed limes.
The volume from the joint take-off, turned into bags of NHL or tubs of putty and the sand to gauge them with, at the ratio the specification names. It batches the lime you were told to use; it does not choose it.
SettingsSettings for this calculation
The standard allowance most suppliers and estimating guides assume for ordinary work.
The volume of lime mortar the joints or the wall take, before any waste.
The lime your specification names. The page batches it; it does not choose it.
Parts of damp, loose sand to one part of lime, by the bucket.
What a loose volume of the NHL 3.5 powder weighs, from the maker's data sheet.
The weight of dry sand in one volume of damp, loose sand, to turn the sand into an order.
What one bag of the natural hydraulic lime holds, as printed on the bag.
What one tub or bucket of the putty weighs, as the supplier sells it.
Extra mortar for what is dropped, left on the spot board or stiffens before it is used.
Lime to buy
2 bags
NHL 3.5 at 1 : 2½ by volume. The mortar is not the lime and the sand added together: in Hanson's measured mixes for its NHL 3,5, 7 buckets of 15 litres (4 US gal) of damp sand per 25 kg (55 lb) bag make 0.10 m³ (3.53 ft³), so at this ratio each volume of sand makes 0.95 of mortar, and the sand shown is the mortar divided by that. The lime, its grade and the ratio are the specification's to set; this page batches them and does not choose them.
- Mortar to make, waste included
- 27.5 gal
- Lime by volume
- 11.55 gal
- Lime by weight
- 62.65 lb
- Sand by volume, damp and loose
- 28.88 gal
- Sand by weight, dry
- 0.15 tons
- Lime and sand together, by weight
- 0.19 tons
- Mortar each bag or tub makes
- 24.14 gal
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Lime Mortar Mix Calculator (NHL and Lime Putty): 2 bags — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- The NHL yield is Hanson's measured table for its own NHL 3,5, gauged with damp sand in heavy-duty 15 litre (4 US gal) buckets at about 7% moisture, and the page applies it to NHL 2 and NHL 5 as well. Another maker's lime, a sharper or rounder sand, or a drier or wetter heap will make a little more or less mortar per bag; a trial batch measured in the barrow settles it for your materials.
- Only 1 : 2, 1 : 2½ and 1 : 3 by volume are offered, because those are the mixes the two yield statements cover. A specification written as 1 : 1½, as a weight ratio, or as a gauged mix with a pozzolan or a little cement added sits outside the rule this page uses and is not batched here. Lancaster Lime Works argues that a putty proportion should come from measuring the void space in the actual sand rather than from a fixed ratio; where that test gives a proportion other than these three, this page cannot batch it.
- Sand is measured damp and loose, the way it is gauged on site, and its weight is shown dry, at the density entered: ASTM C270 takes 80 lb of dry sand to a cubic foot of damp loose sand, 1,280 kg/m³. A merchant's weight of damp sand includes its water and reads higher, and dry sand gauged by the bucket packs more grains into each measure than damp sand does.
- Nothing here selects the lime, the grade, the ratio or the sand. The mortar should be weaker and more vapour-permeable than the brick or stone it joins, and on a listed or historic building the conservation officer, the surveyor or the written specification decides what goes in the joint, usually after the old mortar has been examined.
- Curing is outside the arithmetic: protection from frost, sun and wind, damping down, and how long a batch stays workable are set by the lime's maker. Saint-Astier's sheets say not below 8 °C (46 °F) or above 30 °C (86 °F), with frost kept off for at least 10 days; Hanson's NHL 3,5 sheet gives 5 °C (41 °F) to 30 °C (86 °F). Read the sheet for the lime you buy.
- Premixed lime mortar, bagged dry or delivered as ready-to-use coarse stuff, and hot-mixed lime made from quicklime on site are not covered; buy those by the maker's own yield per bag or tonne. Mixing water is not counted either, and putty's weight already includes the water it is stored in.
- Dry bagged hydrated lime is not batched here: ASTM C207 Type S or SA, sold in the US in 50 lb (22.7 kg) sacks, or CL 90-S powder in the UK. Neither yield statement this page uses covers a dry hydrate, and ASTM C270 weighs it at 640 kg/m³ (40 lb/ft³), half of putty's figure, so batching it here as lime putty roughly doubles the weight of lime the page gives. Do not enter it as putty; take its yield from the maker's sheet or a measured trial batch.
The colour comes out of the sand pit
Almost everything a client notices about a repointed wall is the sand. The binder is a few per cent of the volume and it is nearly white or nearly grey; the aggregate is the rest, and it carries the colour, the texture and much of the durability. Matching is therefore a sand-sourcing exercise: take a lump of the old mortar, crush it, wash the fines out and look at what is left, then go and find a pit or a merchant whose sand looks like that. Grading matters as much as colour and shows up later, because a mortar made with a single-sized fine building sand needs more water, shrinks more and is weaker than one made with sand graded across the range. ASTM C144, Standard Specification for Aggregate for Masonry Mortar, and BS EN 13139, Aggregates for mortar, are the grading envelopes. Then mix a sample panel on a spare piece of the wall and look at it wet as well as dry, because the client will see both.
Buy the sand once. A repoint gauged from two deliveries has a visible line in it and there is no fixing that short of doing it again. That has an awkward commercial consequence on a job this size, because the arithmetic says you need very little: a hundred-odd litres of finished mortar is on the order of 0.14 cubic yards of sand, which is under a fifth of a short ton, or roughly 165 kilograms. Every aggregate yard sells in bulk bags many times that. Buy the surplus anyway, keep it dry and covered on a board, and treat the excess as the price of a wall that matches down its whole length. Note too that the conversion runs off a planning density for dry sand; the bulking of damp sand, and what it does to a gauge box, is set out on the mortar estimating guide.
Sand is batched by volume and sold by weight, so this is the step between the mortar volume and the order. Use the supplier's own density where they publish one; the default is a planning figure for dry building sand.
The volume of sand required, in cubic yards.
Approximate weight
13.5 short tons
About 1.35 short tons per cubic yard for dry building sand; damp sand is heavier and bulks up in volume. This is a planning figure, not a specification. Confirm the density with your supplier before ordering by weight.
- Conversion factor applied
- 1.35 short tons per cu yd
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Sand Cubic Yards to Tons Calculator: 13.5 short tons — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- Weight is the honest unit for sand, with one qualification: part of what a weighbridge records is water. Sand kept in the open carries whatever it has taken up, so a tonnage bought after a wet spell is less sand than the same tonnage bought dry, and nothing on the ticket separates the two.
- The density is for loose-tipped sand, not for sand in the ground. Undisturbed sandy ground is usually packed tighter than the heap it makes once it is dug, so a volume measured in the excavation converts to more tons than this returns. Do not borrow the correction from an earthworks take-off — sand loosens far less on digging than clay or mixed soil, and a swell factor lifted off those overstates it.
- A tonnage is what the sand weighs, not a check on what is carrying it. The sand for one small area already runs to tons, which is enough to matter on a trailer, on a scaffold or a suspended floor, and at the edge of an open excavation where the heap surcharges the face. Those limits come from the vehicle's rating, the structure's design or the excavation's support, not from this figure.
Sand is bought by the yard for bedding and screeding and sold by the ton at most aggregate yards, so this conversion sits between the take-off and the order. Sand has a peculiarity the other aggregates do not share: damp sand bulks, occupying noticeably more volume than the same sand dry or fully saturated, because surface water holds the grains apart. That means a volume measured from a damp stockpile overstates what is actually there, while the weight does not lie. Where accuracy matters, buy by weight and convert, rather than trusting a measured heap.
The profile is a water detail before it is a taste decision
On a wall with no roof, no eaves and no overhang but its own coping, the finished shape of the joint decides where a raindrop goes, and the fashionable choice is the wrong one. A recessed or deeply raked joint leaves a ledge on the top of every brick that holds water against the arris, which is exactly where frost damage starts; it belongs on sheltered work. Weathered and struck joints throw water off the face and are the traditional answer outdoors. A bucket-handle joint compacts the mortar surface as it is formed, which is genuinely useful on a cement-gauged mix. Flush, finished by beating back with a churn brush once the mortar has taken up rather than by ironing it, is the conservation default on lime, because tooling drags binder-rich fines to the surface and gives you a skin that crazes and then sheds. Whichever you choose, match what the wall already has: two profiles on one elevation read as damage even to people who could not name either.
| Profile | What it does with water | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| Weathered or struck | Sheds off the face, leaves no ledge | Exposed external work, the traditional outdoor choice |
| Bucket handle | Sheds, and the tooling compacts the surface | Cement-gauged mixes on exposed work |
| Flush, brushed back | Sheds, keeps an open surface that can dry | Lime mortars, and most conservation specifications |
| Recessed or raked | Holds water on every brick arris | Sheltered and internal work only |
| Overbanded or strap | Traps water behind a hard band, hides the joint line | Nowhere on a wall like this; it is a defect to remove |
Turning litres of joint into an order somebody can fill
The joint volume comes out in litres and nobody sells litres of mortar. What a merchant sells is weight: sand by the bag or the bulk bag, binder by the bag, dry premix by the pallet. So the conversion that closes the gap runs volume to weight. A hundred and four litres is 0.104 cubic metres, about 0.136 cubic yards, which at a planning density of 1.8 short tons per cubic yard for a sand-and-binder mortar is around 0.24 short tons — call it 220 kilograms of placed mortar for the whole repair.
Two cautions on that density. It is a planning figure for a mortar with no coarse aggregate in it, and a lime mortar made with a light, well-graded sand sits below it; where the supplier publishes a figure for their own product, theirs wins. And the weight is not only an ordering number. Two hundred-odd kilograms of mortar, and the several hundred kilograms of sand it was gauged from, have to get from the road to the far end of a garden, usually down a side passage and usually by barrow. On a boundary wall that is frequently the thing that shapes the working day.
The joint volume from the repair take-off, converted into the weight the order will actually be written in, and into the weight somebody has to move down the side of a house.
The volume of mortar in cubic yards.
Approximate weight
18 short tons
About 1.8 short tons per cubic yard for sand-cement mortar; close to concrete but without coarse aggregate. A planning figure, not a specification. Confirm the density with your supplier before ordering by weight.
- Conversion factor applied
- 1.8 short tons per cu yd
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Mortar Cubic Yards to Tons Calculator: 18 short tons — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- This weight is a total for the elevation, summed from joints that go in over days or weeks. Site-mixed mortar is batched to the pace of laying and carried up in tubs, so nothing — platform, hoist or floor — holds this figure at once. Where the work runs off retarded ready-to-use mortar, which arrives wet, or off a site silo of dry preblended material with the mixer at its outlet, the opposite is true: that stock stands on site in bulk, and a charged silo puts a concentrated load on whatever base it was sited on.
- A small mortar tonnage does not turn straight into an order. Site-mixed work is bought as sand and cement in units that do not subdivide — sand by the ton or the yard, cement by the bag — so a job of a yard or two rounds up to the next whole unit of each, and at that scale the rounding moves what arrives more than the density does. On a job several times that size it disappears into the total, and what the mix ratio does to the density matters more.
- The volume converted here is joint volume, and mortar in a wall is not confined to the joints. Hollow units bedded full rather than on their face shells take mortar into the cores, and a collar joint between wythes is solid mortar that no take-off of beds and perpends counts. Where either applies, this tonnage is a lower bound on what to buy.
Mortar volume is worked out from the joint dimensions across a wall, and converting it to weight matters mainly for ordering the sand and cement that make it. The density sits below concrete because there is no coarse aggregate, only sand and binder. The figure most often underestimated is not the density but the volume itself: joints look thin, but across a full elevation the mortar in a single-wythe wall amounts to a substantial proportion of the wall's volume, and perpends consume as much as beds.
Working backwards from the load you were quoted
The conversion runs the other way at least as often, because quotes arrive as weights: a conservation supplier prices hot-mixed lime mortar by the tonne, a merchant sells premix by the pallet. Neither figure says anything about your wall until it is turned back into volume, and the answer here is startling. One short ton at that same 1.8 tons per cubic yard is about 0.56 cubic yards, or 0.42 cubic metres, or 425 litres; a metric tonne, which is what a British quote means by the word, is a tenth as much again at about 470. Take the short ton. At ten millimetres wide and twenty-five deep that is around 1,700 metres of joint: every joint in a nineteen-metre wall, both faces and the coping included, with the better part of five hundred metres left over.
The second thing a weight raises is time. Mortar has a working life, and ready-to-use retarded material has a stated one that belongs to the manufacturer's data sheet rather than to any general rule; site-gauged lime has its own, shorter and weather-dependent. Hand pointing is slow work, and there is no defensible metres-per-day rate anyone can publish for you, because it depends on the joint, the access, the weather and the person. Get your own on the first morning: point for two hours, measure what you covered, and multiply. That rate tells you what size batch is sensible and whether a large wet delivery is an economy or a skip full of stiffened material.
It also tells you the shape of the programme. The coping's 145 metres is a different working position at a different height with different protection, and it is not the same day's work as the base band even though it is the same mortar. Order and batch against the bands separately, and the two numbers stay honest against each other.
A tonnage from a supplier turned back into volume, and from there into metres of joint at your width and depth. It is the check that says whether a quoted load matches the wall or dwarfs it.
Mortar tonnage as delivered.
Approximate volume
5.556 cu yd
About 1.8 short tons per cubic yard for sand-cement mortar; close to concrete but without coarse aggregate. Mortar heaps; allow room beyond this figure.
- Conversion factor applied
- 0.56 cu yd per short tons
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Mortar Tons to Cubic Yards Calculator: 5.56 cu yd — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- Check whether the tonnage came off a ticket as a dry weight. Bagged premix and silo mortar are weighed before mixing, and the mixing water is mass as well as volume, so a dry ton makes more than a ton of mixed mortar and more volume than this returns — read the answer as a floor, unless the ticket was for wet ready-to-use mortar, which needs no adjustment. That comparison is by weight; by volume it runs the other way, because loose dry materials make less mortar than their own bulk suggests.
- Some of this volume never reaches a joint. Mortar is left in the drum, dropped off the board, and squeezed out of beds to be struck off and thrown, and that pulls against the dry-weight allowance rather than adding to it. The two do not reliably cancel — a wet ready-to-use ticket carries the losses with no offset at all — so take them off explicitly instead of assuming one has already covered the other.
- On repointing the depth is not yours to choose: joints are cut back until sound mortar is reached, and on perished work that runs deeper than any nominal figure. With the quantity already fixed, the shortfall shows up as area rather than as a bigger order — the elevation stops partway up, and what finishes it comes from a second batch that will not match the first in colour. Cut out a trial length, measure what it takes, and set the area from that before the rest of the wall is committed to this figure.
Converting a mortar tonnage back to volume tells you how much wall it will build once the joint dimensions are known. Mortar has a working life that aggregates do not: once mixed it must be used before it stiffens, and retempering with extra water to extend it weakens the mix. That constraint means mortar is mixed in batches sized to the pace of laying, so the total tonnage matters less for delivery scheduling than for knowing how much sand and cement to have on site.
Where pointing stops being the answer
There is a condition past which raking and pointing buys a face and not a wall, and it is worth naming before somebody spends a fortnight reaching it. If the joints are dead through the full thickness rather than at the face, if the bricks in the affected band are friable to a depth rather than losing a surface, if the coping has gone and the wall head has been open for years, and if the hole at the base finds no damp course and a footing that has moved, then the material behind the pointing will not hold the pointing. Taking that section down to a sound bed joint and rebuilding it is often cheaper per metre, and it is the only version of the job in which the details that were never there can be put in.
Quantify it as new wall, because that is exactly what it is: length of the section, height back down to the sound course, the real face size of the units and the joint you intend to lay to. What comes back is the number to buy, less whatever the take-down actually salvages, and salvage is the number not to guess at. Units bedded in soft lime generally clean off with a bolster and go back; units bedded in a dense cement mortar break at the arris and the yield collapses. Take that percentage from your own last comparable take-down and nowhere else. New units must also match on more than colour: BS EN 771-1 carries the freeze-thaw and soluble salt categories, ASTM C216 does the equivalent through its weathering grades, and a free-standing garden wall is severe exposure under either.
The rebuild is also the moment to fix causes rather than symptoms: a damp-proof course at a level that still makes sense against the finished ground, a coping that oversails and throws water clear of both faces, and movement provision on a long straight run, for which PD 6697 carries the recommendations and the brick maker's literature carries the figures for the specific unit. What a rebuild does not settle is whether a wall of that height and thickness stands up at all. That is a stability question with its own arithmetic, and it belongs to the guide on building a garden wall.
Length and height of the section coming down, the actual unit face size and the joint width give the count for the rebuild. Deduct salvage from that figure using your own recorded yield, not an assumed one.
SettingsSettings for this calculation
The standard allowance most suppliers and estimating guides assume for ordinary work.
The length of the brick wall or veneer.
The height of the brick wall or veneer.
Extra bricks for cuts, breakage, and corners.
The actual (not nominal) length of your brick face, before adding the mortar joint.
The actual (not nominal) height of your brick face, before adding the mortar joint.
The thickness of the mortar joint between bricks, both horizontally and vertically.
The brick's depth, which becomes the wythe thickness for a single-wythe veneer wall.
Estimated brick needed
1,177 bricks
- Wall area
- 156 sq ft
- Coverage rate (from your dimensions)
- 6.86 bricks/sq ft
- Base brick count (no waste)
- 1,070 bricks
- Mortar mix needed
- 14 80 lb bags
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Brick Calculator: 1,177 bricks — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- Openings and returns are not in the geometry. The count treats the wall as one plain rectangle of face area, with nothing deducted for doors, windows, vents or reveals and nothing added for corners, returns or piers. Take openings out of the length and height you enter before you read the answer.
- It counts one wythe of brick laid flat, showing its long face. A second wythe or cavity leaf, header courses and rowlock bands, and any bond that turns bricks to show their end all put more units in the same area than this returns. Brick depth changes the mortar figure only, never the brick count.
- The mortar figure is joint geometry, not a mix design. It is the volume of the bed and head joints implied by your joint width and brick depth, converted at one premixed bag's published yield; it excludes the collar joint between wythes, droppings and board waste, and it assumes every joint is solidly filled. It does not proportion cement, sand, lime or water for a site-batched mix, and it does not pick a mortar type for your exposure.
- Nothing but brick and bagged mortar is counted. No wall ties, weep holes or vents, lintels, DPC, flashing, movement joints or reinforcement, and no bedding for sills and coping.
- This is a quantity take-off, not a structural design. It says nothing about wall thickness for the height, lateral restraint, wind or retained load, foundations, or the mortar strength the exposure demands. A freestanding, retaining or loadbearing wall needs those from the building code or an engineer.
Curing outdoors, where you control almost nothing
A lime joint wants to stay damp and cool for days, and a boundary wall is a bad place to arrange that: long, awkward to sheet, a garden on both sides and no scaffold to hang hessian from. Sun and wind on the south face will dry a fresh joint faster than frost damages the north one, and both spoil it. The practical answer is hessian kept damp with a hand sprayer and held off the face, over sections short enough to be covered by whoever pointed them. Execution requirements for masonry sit in BS EN 1996-2 with BS 8000-3 in the UK, and TMS 602 carries the cold-weather and hot-weather procedures where that code governs; read whichever applies rather than carrying a remembered threshold across from the other.
The timing decision follows from that. Pointing a garden wall in late autumn is a gamble against a set that has barely started, and a joint frozen before it has gained anything does not recover — it looks acceptable until the second spring, when it comes out on a fingernail. If the survey lands in October, the useful autumn work is the drainage, the ground level, the coping and the pricing, with the pointing itself booked for spring. That is a harder conversation than starting on Monday, and a much cheaper one than pointing the wall twice.
What ends up on the sheet
Three things separate a repoint that lasts from one that gets done again by somebody else: the band you measured rather than the elevation you saw, the depth the chisel actually found rather than the depth the rule suggested, and a written note of what the ground is doing at the base of the wall. Keep the mortar sample reference, the sand source and the sample panel photographs with them. The next person to work on this wall will be reading your sheet in about forty years, which is roughly how long the last one lasted.
Before anything is ordered for the wall
Everything here is geometry and condition, recorded band by band. Keep the surveyed quantity and the confirmed quantity as two separate lines, because the wall will not show you the back of a joint until it is open.
- The band, not the elevation: courses affected on each face — Counted from the ground up and recorded separately per face. A wall dead for eight courses on one side and three on the other is two quantities, not an average.
- The height where the damage stops, and where the ground is — Level and consistent means water from below. Measure the finished ground against the lowest sound course, and note whether a damp course exists at all.
- Joint per course per metre run, from the gauge and the bond — One bed metre plus the perpends. About 1.29 m per course per metre per face for 215 by 65 units on a 75 mm gauge; header courses add to it.
- The coping, counted separately — Bed line on both faces plus a cross joint at every unit, showing on two faces and across the top. On a brick-on-edge cap that came to a third of this repair.
- Raked depth against joint width, with the wythe as the ceiling — Around two to two and a half times the width, stopped early wherever sound mortar resists, and never wider than the joint that is already there.
- Sand source, sample panel and mortar sample reference — One delivery of one sand for the whole job, a panel judged wet and dry, and a lump of the original kept for analysis. All three are cheap now and impossible later.
Opens the calculators above on one screen with the dimensions from this article already filled in. Quantities only — this site publishes no price list, because local prices vary too much to publish honestly.