Not sure where to start now the blog is up so let's begin with just a few pics of my historic brickwork repair that have been done more recently,later I'll look at the older stuff.

This is a 16th century cottage in Kent.

Looks expensive to repair?

No,it's one of the easiest jobs I've ever done,made all the better when the lady of the house gave us toasted bacon sarnies every morning!

In these out of the way rural areas I normally convince clients to feed us(I buy the food)or let us use their kitchen to knock up breakfast and lunch.

After all,nobody wants their builder disappearing down the cafe all day;)

Not so easy was this Dering window,you only find them in the village of Pluckley in Kent,allegedly the most haunted village in England.

Well I never saw any ghosts but there was a poltergeist of sorts as things kept going missing,but that was the pikeys robbing the site!

I can go into the history of the Dering window but just google it.

They are seen in the TV show The Darling Buds of May which was filmed in the village.

I say this wasn't so easy but that's because the bricks I was given to work with were crap and I had to build several of these windows into a ragstone oast where they hadn't previously existed.

The architect decided not to take advice from someone who knew what they were talking about,i.e. the bricks needed to be made by a specialist local brickworks using similar clay and techniques and was eventually thrown off the job.

He went to a firm in York,their bricks are fine for York but about as much use as a chocolate teapot in Kent!

Every single brick was wrong and had to be recut.

Then they put the scaffold in my way!