What is the average cost to repoint a chimney?

Ask what chimney repointing costs and you get a range so wide it is useless. Here is what actually drives the number.

Whether you need chimney work or chimney work services Godalming, we cover the whole area, with 36 years on Surrey roofs behind every fixed price and a 25-year written workmanship guarantee handed over before the team leaves.

Call 07428 300474 any time and a real person answers, day, night or weekend.

What is the average cost to repoint a chimney?

The average cost to repoint a chimney sits in the middle hundreds to low thousands of pounds, because the price is really a price for access. The mortar work itself is a day or two. Getting a safe working platform to a stack three storeys up is what moves the figure.

Access is the biggest single item on the quote

A chimney on a bungalow gable that a roofer can reach off a properly footed ladder and a roof ladder is a different job from a stack sitting in the middle of a steep slate pitch on a Victorian semi. Same mortar, same skill, very different day.

Scaffold, or a tower, or a hoist for a difficult back garden with no side access, is often half the total. That is not padding. It is the part that keeps a man safe while he is knocking out old mortar with a hammer and chisel above a public footpath.

Whether you need chimney work or chimney work in Guildford, we cover the whole area, and the survey tells you which access route the stack actually needs before a number is written down. If a tower will do, we say so. If it needs a full scaffold with a working platform round all four faces, you get told that too, with the reason.

• Single-storey or gable-end stack: light access, lowest end of the range.
• Two-storey stack on an open elevation: tower or partial scaffold.
• Mid-slope or party-wall stack, or no rear access: full scaffold, top of the range.

Size and condition of the stack move the figure next

A small two-pot stack has perhaps six or seven square metres of brickwork across its faces. A tall shared stack with four pots and a corbelled top can be triple that, and every course of it has to be raked out and filled by hand.

Then there is what the rake-out finds. Soft, sandy mortar that comes away in your fingers usually means water has been getting in for years, and often the flaunching around the pots has gone as well as the joints. Frost-blown brick faces have to be cut out and replaced, not skimmed over with mortar. Rusted or lifted lead flashing at the roof line is a common companion job, because that is nearly always where the leak the customer noticed is coming from.

Whether you need chimney work or chimney work in Woking, we cover the whole area, and none of those extras get discovered halfway through and added on. They get found at the free survey, drone included where it saves guessing, and written into one fixed price.

Repointing is sometimes the wrong answer, and that changes the cost

Repointing works when the bricks are sound and only the joints have failed. If a third of the brick faces have blown, or the stack is leaning, or the top few courses have lost their bond, pointing over that is money thrown away. It looks tidy for two winters and then goes again.

In that case a rebuild of the top courses, or the whole stack above the roof line, costs more up front and is cheaper across twenty years. Structural work of that sort can bring building control into it, and GOV.UK guidance on building regulations approval sets out when approval is needed, which is worth knowing before anyone starts. Our chimney work covers repointing, flaunching, flashing, partial rebuilds and full rebuilds precisely so the honest answer is available rather than the convenient one.

If a smaller repair will do, we say so. Nobody here is selling a rebuild to a stack that needs eight hours of pointing.

Why the cheapest quote is usually the most expensive one

The way to make a chimney repointing quote look small is to skip things. Point over soft mortar instead of raking back to a proper depth. Use a mortar too strong for old soft brick, which then cracks the brick faces instead of the joint. Leave the flaunching. Reuse tired flashing. Work off a ladder with no platform because scaffold costs money.

All four of those save the customer something on the day and cost them the whole job again inside five years. That is why we quote a fixed price in writing, with the access method named, and hand over a 25-year written workmanship guarantee before the team leaves. Thirty-six years on Surrey roofs teaches you which corners come back.

If you are searching for a roofer close to home somewhere across Surrey and the Wey Valley, we are local enough to come and look at the stack properly before quoting, and Scott answers the phone himself.

• Free survey, no charge and no obligation for the quote.
• Fixed price in writing, access method and materials included.
• Our own experienced local roofers, never subcontracted.
• Site left tidy, guarantee handed over in writing.