How to mix lime mortar for pointing stone walls

i'm just going to give you a quick demo today on mixing lime mortar and also how i do the pointing in the old stone walls so i'll give you a quick demo on that um so first thing i want to say is lime um it's actually really easy to mix pretty much the same as concrete so originally the lime that they used would have been in its raw form and when you mix it with water it would have heat you know heat it up and it would have smoked and it had been quite toxic so now the line that you can buy in the shops is lime um nhl 3.5 and that's just a more stable product so it's not quite raw there's other additives in it but it still allows the walls to breathe and you can use it pretty much the same as you do concrete um so i use a four to one mix so i use one part lime so one shovel line and then four part sand and that seems to work out pretty well it's strong enough you could do three to one if you wanted it a bit more brittle or you could do five to one if you wanted it a little bit softer so one thing to bear in mind with the lime is depending on what sand you use and what ratio you use and depends on what color it's going to turn out so if you want it really white you do it three to one if you wanted it a bit more sandy you do a five to one or four to one um i tend to buy quite white sand um so instead of the sort of yellow builder stand i specifically buy white um always use the extra fine sand if you can so a zero to two millimeter so the white just gives a really nice color um and textured finish start mixing now doing a four to one mix um what i find works for me is if we mix all the ingredients dry first and then just add a little bit of water to wet down because you want the mix relatively dry so it doesn't stain the um the stones and so it can be pushed in really hard whereas if you have quite a sloppy mix obviously a lot of people do it with a piping bag or something like that you risk staining the stones white with the lime and also it doesn't really get in there so let's start mixing that and my 401 mix it's just for the purpose of the video there's one line in dry one two three four sand so just let that meet up dry in there and then we'll just start adding a tiny bit of water and i'll show you what consistency works best for me don't have it all at once just a little at the time and keep checking so this is consistency we're looking for relatively dry but it's all mixed so not wet not sloppy just like that these are a few things that i use so i've got a spray bottle filled with water and that's just to dampen all the joints because all these are really dry as soon as you put a dryer mix in it'll just suck it up and it won't really stick in so we want to wet the joints a dry brush because we're using a dry mix we can clean off the face of the stones as we go um i use this little trowel to push it in really depends on the width between your stones you can use a slightly bigger trowel or if you want to go for a different effect you can use a really wide trowel and get it quite flat um and then either a board to hold your mortar on or i just use this little trowel here so as you can see i've cleaned out all these joints um highly recommend the compressor and the pneumatic chisel but if you want to scrape it out by hand or whatever you know whatever works it might just take a little bit longer so i've cleaned out all these you don't need to take it far you know keep taking it right back just a couple of centimeters so it sticks in and i'm just going to go through and just wet these joints you can spray the whole thing with water but again when we're thinking about keeping the face as the stones nice and clean it's better to just wet where you're putting them all so there we are that's that doesn't need to be soaking and just going to start putting it in so as you can see i've got my mortar on here push it right up to the joint we're literally just as hard as we can forcing it in between the stones doesn't matter if some drops on the floor just like that and it does take a while probably in a day you'll only get two square meters done if that you know it does take quite a while so just work your way along not too close so at this stage you really don't have to be too neat just getting it in there making sure it's all pushed that's what i'm saying about if your mix is too sloppy you can't really push it hard and make contact with the back because as well as looking nice it's also to stabilize the wall as well so that you want you want the line to be doing its job just by having this little platform to just scoop it off of it just makes it so much easier [Laughter] so at this stage obviously it looks quite messy because you just put it in um so depending on if you're doing it inside or outside or how wet your mix is you might need to wait a little bit for the lime to get stiff enough for you to brush it off without it smudging all over the stones because i've made this quite dry i should pretty much be able to do it as i go and so i've just got a dry paint brush here you can use some people you know if you if you left this a day you could use a really fine wire brush to get it off um but this works for me so all i'm doing now is clean all this excess off with a dry brush and as you can see it's not smudging it's just taking all that off it's already it's looking better there we go it's as simple as that and now what i personally like to do just to finish it off nicely and make sure it's smooth is i just wet the stone a little bit and then just in the joints i'll just smooth it out like that this is you don't need to do this this is just something i like to do but it just sort of seals that edge around the stones so you don't brush the stones with the white this makes it all look a little bit smoother again it's something you know depending on how the finish you want or what your particular particular style of pointing is everyone kind of have their own style you know and how you finish it so it's as easy as that really so there we are so that's a small section pointed so that's kind of you know what it looks like before when it's just allowed and then that's nice and pointed so here's a bigger section that i did the other day it's had time to dry now so it looks a lot better it's really an effective look and it's good for the wall as well is it really it's as easy as that um all it takes is just time and patience because it's really boring um the lime itself could take a good couple of weeks to really fully set you know probably a day after it'll still be supple and the day after that you'll still be able to scratch it away so it'll just get harder and harder and harder over time so um and that's it so i hope you enjoyed watching this little demo i'm no expert by any means but you know i've done a lot of this sort of stuff so if you guys would like to see more videos subscribe to this one and let me know in the comments what you think thanks for watching

Channel: Escape to rural France

Views: 41,105

Rating: 4.9715738 out of 5

Keywords: #rural, #france, #homesteading, #pointing, #lime mortar, #how to, #renovation, #farmhouse

Id: Miy-PEBIk_4

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020