AKICOLJ

[wellinghall]

Saturday's, er, "incident" meant that we had water bubbling up from the ground against the wall of our house for 29 hours or so. Do I need to worry* that it might have damaged the bricks / mortar / anything else?

*Okay, this is me we're talking about; I'm going to worry anyway. Maybe the question should be, how much do I need to worry?

Comments

[purplecat]

Our opposite neighbour for several years was an architect (EDIT: academic architectural historian type) and our pointing is upside-down so rain water is encouraged to flow into the bricks rather than away from the bricks. In his opinion the main concern from the resulting dampness of the bricks was frost since that would cause the water soaked into the bricks to expand and damage them. In his opinion, given we lived in Manchester, which never gets that cold, this was a minor concern. He certainly thought the damage that would be caused to the brickwork by removing the existing pointing and redoing it properly would far outweigh the damage that might be caused by a frost while the bricks were wet.

Based on this I would be inclined to assume that unless there is a hard frost in the next couple of weeks you should be fine.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thank you, louisedennis - that sounds sensible.