When we decided to write a piece for our website about ‘How to repoint with lime’ we realized pretty quickly that we were never going to be able to put together some sort of tutorial that suddenly turned you, the reader of this piece, into a repointing expert. 

What we thought we’d do instead is tell you just how difficult and time-consuming repointing actually is. In fact, if we were to do a step-by-step guide to lime repointing, we’d be starting with the line, ‘get yourself a tuck pointer, a bag of lime and years of experience’.

Here at Leyden, we don’t encourage or teach people to do their own repointing and that’s not because we’d be losing business, it’s because lime repointing isn’t a DIY job. Laying a few blocks, building a shed or putting down some decking are all jobs that potentially could be described as DIY, but lime repointing is not and here’s the reason why.

It’s not about being handy, it’s about craftsmanship.

Craftsmanship is something you’re taught over a period of time, you learn it from those people that have experience. You ‘serve time’ on projects, you get to understand the make-up of the materials, the capabilities of the tools and you get to understand your own limits.

Lime repointing is time consuming. When you’re faced with a stone wall with pointing that’s failed over time, you first have to make a decision about how far back to go when raking out the old lime, or worse still, the crumbling cement that’s replaced the original lime. Removing old lime or cement takes a huge amount of patience, a good eye and genuine experience because it’s about knowing when to stop removing and when to start replacing.

Next, you’re into materials and getting the balance right, which again takes experience. Mixing up on a project should never be under-estimated because it’s not a simple process. It’s about the quality of material, atmospheric conditions and moisture levels and then it’s about using your eyes to watch what happens and even your ears to listen to how the mix is sounding. It’s incredibly difficult to describe.

Then and only then can you start the repointing itself and that’s about touch and feel, knowledge, experience and of course bending yourself into some weird, obscure positions to get the job done properly.

Let’s be honest, lime repointing isn’t something you can learn off a YouTube clip and it certainly isn’t something you can teach in a blog. You’re best off calling in the experts.

At Leyden we’re those experts, specializing in hand-crafted pointing, lime rendering, lime plasters and decorative features. Craftsmanship is everything to us and we’re proud of the fact that we’re grounded in our obsession with traditional materials and their ability to help preserve heritage properties. 

If you’d like to know more about how we could with help your repointing project, then get in contact with us at Leyden on [email protected], we are after-all, serious about craftsmanship.

Matt & Hannah