Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
Steve Firth wrote:
But that sort of finish doesn't look good on many older houses. Raised
does.

Presuming that you mean "strap" pointing (a) it looks like **** and (b)
it's out of place on older houses.

Think it's called 'tuck' pointing round here. And was standard practice
from new in Victorian times, but only to the front of the house.

Standard on stone, and a bad idea there. But I thought we were talking
about older houses, not Johnny-come-lately-new-fangled Victorian? The
Victorians had some stupid ideas about building and ruined many Georgian
buildings with inappropriate pointing and the use of hard mortar where
they should have been using lime mortar. So I wouldn't take a Victorians
view on how to point a house.

There's also (c) it damages the
brickwork.

Mine seems to have survived rather well in over 100 years. Seen plenty of
newer houses with spalling bricks. But a different type of brick, usually.

It holds water agains the brick/stone and encourages both penetrating
damp and spalling. It was perhaps the single crappest idea in a whole
list of crap Victorian ideas. You might not have seen it causing
problems, I've lived in both stone (Georgian) buildings and brick
(Victorian) buildings which have been ruined by strap pointing. And in
both cases I've had to pay good money to get rid of it.

On much older houses the concave pointing would be wrong too - as it sort
of depends on having perfectly uniform bricks and bricklaying.

The pointing on Georgian buildings is done in lime mortar, and the
bricks are usually laid both uniformly and with a finer mortar joint
than the modern horror.

I would help if you gave an era for "much older".