Quick and Easy Way to Point a Stone Wall with Lime Mortar

this is a quick and easy way to point a wall using lime mortar i will show you how to transform this crumbling wall that only a few months ago was completely covered in ivy to the extent you couldn't even see the wall into this limestone wall that maintains the traditions of how it was built using limewater and i'm going to show you how to do it now [Music] this is a limestone wall in france make sure you've cleared everything out all the dirt all the debris it's all prepped and ready to go spread with a bit of water to get that dust out so what do you need you need a it's going to be much easier with a cement mixer although you can easily do small amounts in a big bucket or a tub you're going to need sand so this sand here is a mixture of fine sand and it's it's two and four when you have a good mixture it will bond much better if you've just got fine sand or if you've got big kind of stony sand then it's just going to crumble a lot more so you want a good mixture that's going to set well with the the lime so this is cho blanche which is also known as lime in english and it's nhl 3.5 you can get 5.0 which is a lot stronger now what you're gonna need is three to one so three imagine three buckets of sand to one bucket for sure blanche and that's the mix and then you just continually add water and it will slowly make a mix so let's just quickly go through that so i've added a little bit of water just to get it going because i've washed out from before i know roughly it's nine scoop fulls will make three buckets [Applause] um now for the show blanche you really should wear protection because if it gets in your eyes and if you breathe it in it's not good for you so pop on the pop on the eye goggles the key is to not put all the water in at once so continually add it and just kind of watch the mix and you'll see you want it to just kind of hold you want to hold up the mix and then it will just kind of slowly slide off you don't want it too wet you don't want it too hard you want a really good consistency so it ordered here to the wall okay so just check it to see how it is i'm going to touch my water and then we're ready [Music] [Applause] so that's the kind of consistency you want it's not kind of swimming in water also it's not hard enough it's got a nice mix so you're gonna have to still be quick and you might need to add some water if it does dry out so that's ready to go once you've made the mix it's ready to start pointing this is the most important time as well to obviously wear the gloves because as you apply it will go on your hands and if you're doing it with no gloves on they will get really dry so you can see this is before and as i said you really want to clear out in between the stones as much possible they're still going to be the odd stone dust and debris but just get rid of all organic matter and then you can start applying it and this is what i did yesterday and this morning uh it's dried and i've brushed it off and you'll see that entire process make sure you've got the appropriate tools so you've got a float a trowel you can have different sizes so this is a set here there's a big one that you can just scoop it on there and then this is for the smaller gaps and then slightly bigger and what you also want to do is you want to catch anything that goes on the ground so you can reuse it so just put a board down and then you can start reapplying it once it falls down the reason why this is quick and easy is you don't really want to be too much kind of perfecting it getting into the crack i mean that's a technique but you will be here forever especially if it's not an important wall let's say it's outside it's not inside your house so what we're doing here is i'm just trying to get in in there as much as possible if i need to i can just put a stone like this if it's a big enough gap get it in deeper really you want to just fill this up as much as possible really get it in there and then what we're going to do afterwards is scrape a lot of the excess off the style is a lot more kind of rustic it's not perfect but it will do the job and it will kind of seamlessly flow in with the in with the stones up here there were a lot of vines and as i ripped the vines out it took the stones with them so i've had to rebuild slightly and it's really important that you don't just kind of pack it all in pack some stones in you need to build it up and let it dry in layers so i've done this a bit yesterday and a bit this morning and it's still drying you can then scrape away if you then want to add a stone or if you want to add more mix uh to it so it adheres better one thing i forgot to mention that before you start you should make sure that the wall is kind of wet slightly so just use a kind of a sprayer or use a hose on a very fine setting and just spray the wall make sure it goes in with the gaps and especially have it if you have this kind of dirt you want it to go more sand like so it will adhere [Music] so once you've got to this stage and you it's getting towards the end of the day and you've filled as much as you can you don't want to make a new mix then what you want to do now scrape away any of the excess water and then you're going to get a brush a kind of a soft brush and just brush between the stones to create a nice effect so it all kind of smooths over with the stones i'm using my son's little spade but what you can do which i was hoping to do is cut one of these chows and you have a kind of flat edge and kind of scrape away so that's what you're going to be doing is you're just going to be scraping away [Music] here [Music] so i've scraped off down here a little bit now i'm just going to brush it with a bit of water to smooth out [Music] there we go last bit of brushing just touching up a few bits what i did find is with these gloves they're not fully protected all the way around so my hands were getting a little bit dry after day two so i put these plastic gloves on underneath and they've really helped so that's the finished wall and it dries at different times so the bottom is still drying and little bits at the top but eventually it should all come to one same color this wall is about four by two this side but really you could do this in about two days maybe one day if you didn't have all that stuff to pack and if there's two of you you could easily do it in a day so it is really quick and easy start early it's really important you do the whole process in the day from filling to scraping to brushing and you should have a really nice finished wall at the end of it [Music] you

Channel: Living in the Loire

Views: 2,300

Rating: 4.8878503 out of 5

Keywords: lime, point a wall, pointing, pointing stone wall, how to, easy pointing, natural hydraulic lime, natural hydraulic lime mortar mix, lime mortar, limestone wall, france, french limestone, bricolage facile, quick and easy, traditional construction, build a wall, rural france, diy renovation on a budget, escape to france, diy in france, old property, french counry living, chateaux, french style, european style, renovation, renovating

Id: MGiucIP5Wm0

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021