Brick Cladding Systems VIC 2026 - Get Quotes

What Brick Veneer Really Is

Brick veneer is the most common wall in Victoria and the least understood. From the street it looks identical to a solid brick house, and plenty of owners have lived in one for thirty years believing the brick holds the roof up. The brickwork carries nothing but itself. The structure is a timber or steel frame standing behind the brickwork, carrying the floor, the ceiling and the roof, while the brick skin sits in front of it on its own footing, held upright by metal ties bedded into the mortar joints and bridging a cavity of roughly forty millimetres. The brick is cladding in every sense that matters. Anything you do to it is cladding work rather than structural work.

Three things follow from that and all three come up on repair jobs. Removing a section of brickwork does not threaten the building, which makes rebuilding a damaged panel a straightforward operation rather than a structural one. The cavity behind is a drainage space, so water getting through the brick is expected and has to be able to leave. And the ties are doing the only job holding the skin vertical, which is why tie corrosion in an older wall is a genuine safety matter rather than a maintenance item. Standing on the footpath tells you none of those three things.

Solid masonry is the other Victorian wall and it belongs to a different era. Houses built before roughly 1920 across the inner suburbs, and a good many in Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong and Castlemaine, are double brick, meaning two skins bonded together with header courses and no cavity. The brickwork is structural there, the mortar is usually lime based and soft by modern standards, and the bricks themselves are often softer than anything made today. Repairs on those walls are conservation work rather than bricklaying, and the biggest single risk to them is a well intentioned repoint in the wrong material. Plenty of sound nineteenth century walls have been ruined by a contractor doing their best with a modern mix.

Telling the two apart from outside is easier than owners expect. Look at the brickwork around a window or door and count whether any bricks are laid end on, showing a short face rather than a long one. Those are header courses tying two skins together and they mean solid construction. An unbroken run of long faces in every course, with no headers anywhere, is veneer. Build date does most of the work too, since Victoria moved to veneer construction through the post war decades and has built very little else since. A house from the 1970s is veneer unless something unusual happened.

Cavity brick sits between the two and turns up occasionally on better houses from the 1920s to the 1950s. Two brick skins with a genuine cavity between them, tied rather than bonded, so the outer skin does the weathering and the inner skin does the structure. It behaves like veneer at the outer face and like solid brickwork in terms of what is holding the building up. Anybody quoting work on a wall of that vintage should be able to say which of the three they are looking at, and if they cannot, that is worth knowing before the deposit.

Which type you own governs the whole conversation that follows. It decides whether a crack is structural or cosmetic, whether a wall can be opened up safely, what mortar goes back in, whether there is a cavity for water to drain through and who is qualified to do the work. An hour spent establishing it, through a building inspection where it is not obvious, is the cheapest money on the whole job. Most bricklayers will tell you in five minutes standing in front of the wall. Asking them to say which it is, out loud, is a reasonable request at quoting stage.

The Brick Cladding Systems in Use Here

Conventional brick veneer remains the default on Victorian project housing and the growth corridors are full of it. A single skin of extruded clay brick, laid on a footing or a slab edge rebate, tied back to the frame at the spacings the code requires, with weepholes at the base course and articulation joints at intervals on long walls. Supplied and laid, expect $210 to $420 a square metre in 2026 depending on the brick, the access and the complexity of the openings. The brick itself accounts for less of that than most owners assume. Labour, scaffold, ties, flashings and the lintels over openings fill most of the figure.

Thin brick facings have grown quickly on Victorian townhouses and upper level additions, and they answer a real structural problem. A full brick skin needs a footing to stand on, which makes it awkward above a ground floor, while a slip is a slice of brick perhaps twenty millimetres thick adhered to a backing board on a lightweight frame. The result reads as brickwork from the footpath and weighs a fraction of the real thing. It comes to $240 to $480 a square metre installed and it lives or dies on the backing system and the corner details.

Recycled brick has become a market in its own right in Melbourne and it deserves mention because the pricing surprises people. Demolition stock from the inner suburbs, particularly the cream Hawthorn bricks and the older reds, is sought after for feature walls and extensions where a new brick would look wrong against a period house. Cleaned recycled bricks often cost more than new ones, they vary in size and hardness, and laying them is slower. An experienced bricklayer will price that honestly and a cheap quote on recycled stock has usually not allowed for the sorting. Expect a proportion of any recycled pallet to be unusable, and expect that to be said upfront rather than discovered later. Most bricklayers order about ten per cent over when working with recycled stock.

Glazed and face feature brickwork turns up on architect designed work through Fitzroy, Carlton and Northcote, where the detailing matters more than the material. Stack bonding, raked joints, projecting courses and coloured mortar all read at close range and all depend on the bricklayer rather than the brick. The architectural cladding page deals with designed facades generally, and the bricklaying and blockwork page covers the trade side. Where a feature panel is going up on a visible elevation, ask to see completed work rather than a brochure.

Rendered brickwork is the last variation and it hides more sins than any other finish in Victoria. A coat of render over brick or block produces the flat painted look that sold well through the 2000s, and it also conceals what the brickwork underneath is doing. Cracking telegraphs through render reliably, so a rendered wall with a crack in it has a cracked wall behind the render. Finishes are dealt with on the render and texture coating page, and working out the cause, which must come before any surface patching on a rendered wall, sits on the cladding repairs page. Patching render over a live crack buys about two summers.

Reactive Clay, Articulation and What Cracking Means

Melbourne's soils do more damage to brickwork than its weather does. Large parts of the west and north, through Sunbury, Melton, Werribee, Craigieburn and out toward Bacchus Marsh, sit on clay that takes up water and swells in winter, then gives it up and shrinks in summer. A footing sitting in that clay rides up and down with it, and a brick wall standing on the footing has no capacity to absorb the movement, so it cracks. The pattern is seasonal rather than progressive, which is the single most useful distinction on this whole page. Get that distinction right and most of the rest follows from it.

Movement that shows up each February and disappears by August is the ground talking. Pack that gap with something that cannot flex and it reappears a hand's width along, with the owner paying twice. A crack that widens year on year and never recovers is something else, and it may indicate a genuine footing failure, a leaking drain washing fines out from under a footing, or a tree taking moisture out of the clay on one side of the house only. Those three have different remedies and the same appearance at first glance. Only observation over time, or an engineer, separates them reliably. A single photograph of a crack tells nobody very much.

Which is why monitoring beats guessing and costs nothing. Mark the ends of the crack with a pencil and the date, photograph it against a ruler, and repeat the exercise in three months and again at six. Watching through a full winter and the following summer tells you more than any contractor can in one visit, and it turns a vague concern into evidence. Owners who do this arrive at quotes knowing whether they need a cosmetic repair or an engineer. Those who skip it usually buy the wrong one.

Articulation joints are how modern Victorian brickwork copes with all of this. A vertical joint filled with a flexible bead rather than rigid mortar, so it can open and close, placed at intervals along a long wall and at points of stress such as beside openings and at changes of height, allows the wall to move without cracking. Site classification drives how many are needed, and on a highly reactive site there will be several on each elevation. Where an older wall has none and is cracking predictably in the same places, retrofitting an articulation joint at the crack is a legitimate repair rather than a patch. It gives the movement somewhere to go instead of resisting it, which is the whole idea.

Crack stitching is the other genuine repair and it is widely misunderstood. Stainless helical bars are bedded into raked out horizontal joints across the crack, tying the brickwork either side back together so the wall acts as one panel again. It works well where the movement has been diagnosed and dealt with, and runs $480 to $2,200 depending on the length and access. It does not work as a substitute for fixing whatever caused the crack. Methods and assessment are set out on the wall crack repair page. Stitching a crack whose cause is still active simply moves the next crack a course or two away.

Where the footing itself has failed, the answer is below ground rather than in the brickwork. Underpinning takes the load down to more stable material, and on the older timber framed houses of the inner suburbs restumping and reblocking deals with the equivalent problem under a suspended floor. Both are engineering led and both cost considerably more than any brick repair. An engineer assessment at $650 to $1,800 is the step that establishes whether you are in that territory, and no bricklayer should be making that call on their own. An honest one will say so and recommend the assessment rather than quote around it.

Trees deserve their own paragraph because they cause more clay related cracking in Melbourne than anything else and the remedy is often free. A large eucalypt, willow or liquidambar within its own height of a house will draw moisture from the clay on that side, shrinking the soil there while the other side stays wet, which tilts the footing rather than lifting it. Taking a tree out or cutting it back hard is occasionally the entire repair. It can also make things worse in the short term as the soil rehydrates and swells, so this is a conversation to have with an arborist and an engineer rather than a chainsaw.

Lintels, Ties and the Hidden Steel

There is more steel in a Victorian brick wall than owners realise and almost all of it is invisible. Every window and door opening in brickwork is spanned by a lintel, and in houses built from the 1950s through to the 1980s that lintel is typically a galvanised steel angle. Galvanising is a sacrificial coating with a finite life, and once it has gone the steel begins to corrode. Rust occupies more volume than the steel it came from, so a corroding lintel expands and lifts the brickwork sitting on it. The wall above it has no choice but to move, and what you see is the crack that movement produces.

That is what a stepped crack above a window usually means, and the giveaway is a rust coloured stain weeping from the mortar joint at the head of the opening. The crack appears well after the corrosion started, which is why a stepped crack over an opening deserves a proper look rather than a fill. Replacing a lintel means propping the brickwork above, cutting out the old steel, fitting new and rebuilding the affected courses. It runs $1,400 to $4,800 for a single opening depending on the span and the access.

Doing it properly rules out another light galvanised angle as the replacement. Hot dip galvanised steel to a heavier coating, or stainless, is the correct answer, along with a damp proof course and flashing above the lintel so water crossing the cavity is directed out rather than sitting on the steel. Leave that detail out and the new steel will be rusting on the same schedule the old one managed. Get the steel specification and the detail above it named in the quote.

Wall ties are the other hidden steel and tie failure is a more serious matter. The ties hold a veneer skin upright against wind load, and in older walls they were often light galvanised strip that has corroded in the cavity where nobody can see it. A wall with failed ties can bow outward, and in an extreme case a panel can come away. Bulging brickwork, a wall visibly out of plumb, or horizontal cracking at regular vertical intervals all warrant an engineer before anything else happens. Those intervals correspond to the tie spacings, which is what makes the pattern diagnostic. A bricklayer who recognises that pattern will stop and recommend an engineer rather than quote a repair.

Remedial ties are a well established fix and the work disturbs less than owners expect. Stainless mechanical or resin ties are drilled through the brick face into the frame or inner skin at an engineered pattern, and the holes are made good afterwards. It is a specialist job, it is priced per tie, and it is considerably cheaper than rebuilding a wall. Coastal exposure accelerates the original problem, so houses within reach of Port Phillip and the open coast are where this turns up most. Anybody quoting tie replacement should be working to an engineer's pattern rather than a rule of thumb.

Weepholes, Damp Course and Ground Level

Weepholes are the open perpend joints you can see along the base course of any brick veneer wall, and they are not optional decoration. Water that gets through the brick skin runs down the inside face and collects on the flashing at the bottom of the cavity, and the weepholes are how it leaves. Block them and the cavity holds water against the frame. They also admit the air that dries the cavity out, which matters more in a Victorian winter than in a warm climate because nothing else in there is doing any drying. Sunlight never reaches a cavity and warm air rarely does either.

They get blocked constantly and almost always by the owner's own improvements. A concrete path poured against the wall, a garden bed built up over the base course, mulch piled against the brickwork, render carried down over the weepholes, or paving laid to the same level as the brick all do it. Every one of those is a common Victorian landscaping decision and every one of them turns a working wall into a wet one. Clearing and reinstating weepholes runs $18 to $45 a metre and is the cheapest useful work on this page. Where paving has to be cut back to reach them, that is a separate and larger job. Get both priced together so the saving on the weepholes is visible against the concrete work.

The damp proof course sits at or near the base of the wall and it is a physical barrier stopping moisture rising out of the ground through the masonry. Bridge it and moisture goes around the barrier and up into the wall above, which shows as a damp band, salt deposits and deteriorating plaster on the inside. The bridges are the same culprits as the blocked weepholes, with the addition of a render coat that runs from the wall down onto a path. Putting the ground back where it belongs is the repair, and it costs a fraction of chasing the damp inside. Cut the path back or dig the bed down and the original clearance returns, after which the wall dries itself.

Rising damp assessment sorts out whether moisture is coming up from the ground, across from a bridged path, down from a failed gutter or sideways through the wall. All four look similar at the skirting and all four have different remedies. Injecting a chemical damp course into a wall whose real problem is a concrete path against it solves nothing and costs a good deal. Working out the source first is not a delay before the job, it is most of the job.

Efflorescence is the white powdery bloom that appears on brickwork through a wet Victorian winter, and it is a symptom rather than a disease. Water moving through the masonry dissolves salts and deposits them on the surface as it evaporates. Brushing it off dry works and washing it usually makes it worse by driving the salts back in. What matters is that persistent efflorescence in the same place year after year is telling you water keeps arriving there, so the useful response is finding the source rather than buying a cleaner. A gutter, a downpipe, a flashing or the ground level accounts for most of it.

Fretting is the more serious cousin and it turns up in the bayside suburbs and on old soft bricks. Salts crystallising inside the brick rather than on its surface exert pressure that breaks the face off, leaving a crumbling pitted brick that gets worse each season. On an old wall this is usually a sign that moisture is being trapped, frequently by a hard cement repoint or an impermeable paint. The fix involves removing whatever is trapping the moisture and replacing the worst bricks, and it needs someone who works on old masonry rather than a general bricklayer. Cutting out and replacing individual fretted bricks is slow, careful work and it is priced accordingly. On a badly affected wall, replacing the worst thirty bricks often looks better than replacing three hundred.

Mortar, Repointing and Tuckpointing

The most expensive mistake made on Victorian brickwork costs almost nothing at the time it is made. Old inner suburban bricks are soft, and the lime mortar they were laid in is softer still, which is deliberate. The mortar is meant to be the weak point, so that movement and salt damage are taken by the joint, which is cheap to replace, rather than by the brick, which is not. Repoint that wall with a modern hard cement mortar and the relationship inverts. The joint becomes stronger than the brick and the brick face starts breaking away instead.

Which is why repointing a period Melbourne house is a materials decision before it is a labour one. A lime based mortar matched to the original in strength, colour and texture is the correct answer on anything laid before roughly 1920, and it is what heritage advisers and conservation bricklayers will specify. It costs more per square metre and it takes longer to cure. Owners who accept a cheap cement repoint on an 1880s terrace usually see the consequences within a decade, and the consequences cost many times the saving. Replacing a hundred spalled brick faces is not a repair anybody enjoys paying for.

Ordinary repointing on a post war veneer wall is a different and much simpler proposition. Raking out the deteriorated joint to a sound depth and repointing in a cement mortar matched for colour comes to between $65 and $140 a square metre, and on those bricks a cement mortar is entirely appropriate. Weather facing walls, particularly southwestern elevations, need it before the others. A wall where you can rake mortar out with a screwdriver is due, and one where the mortar has receded past the brick arris is overdue. Once water is sitting in a recessed joint through winter, the brick edges start going next. Weather facing walls reach that point a decade before the sheltered ones do.

Tuckpointing is the decorative technique that gives Melbourne terraces their crisp white lines and it is a separate skill again. A coloured backing mortar matched to the brick is applied to the joint, then a fine ribbon of contrasting putty is laid into it and trimmed, producing a precise raised line that makes the brickwork look more regular than it is. Genuine tuckpointing costs somewhere from $180 to $420 a square metre on a period frontage. It is slow, specialised work and the number of people doing it well in Victoria is limited. Ask to see a completed frontage rather than a photograph, because the quality shows at arm's length.

Painted brickwork raises a question that comes up on half the terraces in Fitzroy and Carlton. A previously painted wall generally has to stay painted, because stripping paint from soft old bricks damages the faces and rarely returns the wall to anything presentable. Where paint is failing, a breathable mineral coating is a far better choice than an acrylic that seals moisture in. Systems suited to period fabric are covered on the heritage home painting page. Heritage overlay controls may also have a view on colour, which is worth checking before the brushes come out.

Brick Slips and Thin Facings

Brick slips solve a structural problem elegantly and introduce a detailing one. A full brick skin weighs enough to need its own footing, which is why traditional veneer stops at the ground floor and an upper level is usually clad in something lighter. A slip is a thin slice of real brick, commonly fifteen to twenty five millimetres, adhered to a backing board fixed to a lightweight frame, and the finished wall reads as brickwork while weighing a fraction of it. On Victorian townhouses and second storey additions it has become the standard way to carry a brick appearance upward. Whole streets in the newer suburbs are real brick below and facings above without anybody noticing. Nobody on the footpath can pick the join, which is what the product is for.

Everything then depends on the backing system rather than the slip. Purpose made boards with a mechanical key, an adhesive rated for the application and a jointing mortar designed to move with the substrate are what make these walls last, and the systems from established manufacturers come with published details for corners, openings and terminations. Slips adhered directly to a render coat or to plain sheeting with a general purpose adhesive will eventually come off, usually starting at an external corner. Ask which system is being used and whether the installer has the manufacturer details.

Corners are the honest test of a slip job. A real brick wall turns a corner with alternating headers and stretchers, and a slip wall has to imitate that with purpose made return pieces so the corner does not read as a wallpaper edge. Manufacturers make corner slips for exactly this reason. Where an installer proposes to mitre flat slips at a corner instead, the result will show, and it will show from the footpath rather than at close range. Purpose made returns cost more per piece and they are the difference between brickwork and a brick pattern.

Movement joints matter on slip walls just as they do on real brickwork and they get forgotten more often. The lightweight frame behind a slip wall moves with temperature and with the building, and a continuous run of rigid jointing mortar over a long elevation will crack somewhere. Where the drawings show no movement joints on a slip elevation longer than about six metres, that is worth raising. Fitted, expect $240 to $480 a square metre, above full brick veneer for a reason. The backing boards, the adhesive, the corner pieces and the jointing all carry real cost.

Weatherproofing on a slip wall sits behind the slips in the same way it does on any lightweight cladding. You need a breathable layer doing the draining, flashings wherever the wall is interrupted, and an escape route at the bottom, and not one of those can be seen once the facings are stuck on. In a heated Victorian house the membrane also has to let vapour out of the framing, which rules out an impermeable sarking. What sits behind board based systems generally is set out on the wall panel installation page.

Licensing, Insurance and Compliance

Bricklaying in Victoria is not a separately licensed trade, which surprises owners who assume it must be. There is no bricklayer's licence to check, so the verification available to you is the builder registration that applies to the contract as a whole. Cross $10,000 and the work needs a major domestic building contract with a builder listed on the Victorian Building Authority register; cross $16,000 and that builder owes you an insurance certificate before taking a cent. The register prints the class of registration next to the name, so it also shows what they are permitted to build.

Below those thresholds a bricklayer works under their own trade arrangements and the protection you have comes from the Australian Consumer Law rather than from a licence. Guarantees on what was supplied and how it was built run through the ACCC nationally and Consumer Affairs Victoria locally, regardless of whether anybody needed registering. This state also sets warranty periods on residential work, with a longer one where a defect is structural, and masonry can land on either side of that division according to what went wrong. A crack caused by an omitted articulation joint is a different category from mortar that weathered early. Keeping the contract and the invoices is what makes either claim possible. Without them the conversation is about recollection rather than about evidence.

Where a dispute cannot be sorted out directly the route is well defined and does not begin at a tribunal. Write to the builder first, then lodge it with Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria, whose conciliators can make orders that bind, and a hearing at VCAT only comes after that. Photographs taken as the work proceeded are what these matters turn on, particularly pictures of ties, flashings and lintels before the brickwork covered them. Nobody can inspect any of that once a wall is closed. Half a dozen pictures on a phone cost nothing and settle most arguments before they start.

Any structural repair needs a structural engineer, and that is a design requirement rather than a formality. Underpinning, tie replacement patterns, lintel spans above a certain size and any repair responding to footing movement should be designed by a structural engineer, and the footing rules that design answers to are published by the Australian Building Codes Board. Your building surveyor may require that design before issuing a permit. A bricklayer working to an engineer's drawing is on solid ground, and a bricklayer working to experience alone on a structural matter is exposing both of you. Where a bricklayer and an engineer disagree, the drawing is what the surveyor will go by.

Two site matters administered by WorkSafe Victoria come up on brick jobs. Cutting bricks and mortar dry releases crystalline silica dust and the controls are water suppression or on tool extraction along with respiratory protection, which is standard practice now rather than an imposition. And on anything built before 1990, sheeting coming off beside the brickwork counts as asbestos bearing until a laboratory rules otherwise, a process set out on the asbestos testing and inspection page. Neither adds much to a quote and both are worth asking about. Anybody treating either of those as an inconvenience has said plenty about how the rest would go.

Heritage overlays control brickwork more tightly than most other materials in Victoria. Councils through the older Melbourne suburbs, along with Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine, routinely have a view on mortar colour and composition, joint profile, whether painted brickwork may be stripped, and whether tuckpointing must be reinstated. A permit may be required for work that owners assume is maintenance. The council heritage adviser will discuss a proposal informally before anything is lodged, which costs nothing and saves a great deal of rework. Going in with a mortar sample and a photograph makes that conversation far more productive. Advisers respond well to somebody who has clearly looked at the wall first.

Around Victoria

Soil movement dominates the brickwork conversation across Melbourne's west and north. Sunbury, Melton, Werribee, Tarneit, Craigieburn and the corridors beyond them sit on reactive clay, so articulation joints are numerous on new work and seasonal cracking is the commonest complaint on existing walls. Bricklayers working those suburbs read the crack patterns fluently and will usually say straight away whether what you have looks seasonal. Knowing the district beats a cheaper hourly figure from somebody who has never worked that soil. Put the question about what the crack is doing ahead of the question about price.

Closer in the problem inverts, since the ground is generally better and the brickwork is old and soft. Fitzroy, Carlton, Richmond, North Melbourne, Brunswick and the surrounding streets are solid masonry laid in lime mortar, frequently painted, often tuckpointed originally, and almost always under a heritage overlay. Work there is conservation rather than construction and the trades who do it well are a small group. Getting the mortar specification right is the single decision that matters most, and it is worth paying a conservation bricklayer rather than a general one.

The bayside suburbs, the Mornington Peninsula and the Bellarine add salt to everything within a narrow band. Fretting brick faces, corroding wall ties and lintels reaching the end of their galvanising all show up earlier close to the water than they do inland. Stainless replacements for ties and lintels are the sensible specification there rather than a luxury. Move a kilometre inland and the exposure falls off sharply, at which point the upgrade stops paying for itself. Trades working a particular stretch of coast can place that boundary far better than any printed rule.

Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Maldon put the state's broadest annual temperature swing together with its strictest heritage controls outside the capital. Frost through winter and high thirties in summer put more work into a mortar joint than a coastal climate does, and much of the housing stock is nineteenth century solid brick with the soft bricks and lime mortar that go with it. Local bricklayers with conservation experience exist in those towns and are worth finding. Freight on matching bricks is also less of an issue there than in Melbourne, since local demolition stock is often closer to the original.

Down through Geelong, Gippsland and along the Murray the issue is simply who is available. Tuckpointing, engineered tie retrofits and conservation repointing are all thin on the ground away from the city, which stretches lead times and means anybody coming out from Melbourne adds travel to the figure. Try the nearest tradesperson before the capital, since that one call can remove both the mileage and the delay. With nobody nearby, gathering enough work to justify the journey beats calling somebody out for one small repair. Neighbours with the same cracks occasionally solve that problem between them.

Costs in Detail

A new veneer skin supplied and laid sits between $210 and $420 a square metre here in 2026, and the brick accounts for less of that than owners expect. Labour, scaffold, the ties and flashings, the lintels over openings and the sorting of the stock all sit inside it. A plain wall with few openings prices near the bottom of that range while an elevation with several windows, a return and a raked joint sits at the top. Thin facings on a lightweight frame cost $240 to $480 a square metre, above full veneer because the backing system and the corner pieces carry real cost.

Repointing a post war wall in cement mortar runs from $65 up to $140 a square metre and considerably more in a matched lime mortar on a period house, where the material costs more and the work goes slower. A period frontage tuckpointed properly lands anywhere from $180 to $420 a square metre. Both are quoted by area and both depend heavily on how deteriorated the existing joint is, since raking out a hard old joint takes longer than raking a soft one. Ask for a rate and an area rather than a lump sum so the two can be checked. A lump sum on repointing tells you nothing about whether the whole wall is included.

Lintel replacement over a single opening runs $1,400 to $4,800, driven by the span, whether the brickwork above needs propping and how difficult the access is. Crack stitching runs $480 to $2,200 depending on length. Retrofitting an articulation joint into an existing wall sits at the lower end of that same range. Remedial wall ties are priced per tie to an engineer's pattern, so a quoted total without a pattern behind it is a guess.

Getting an engineer to assess a cracked wall costs $650 to $1,800 and nothing else here delivers as much for the money. It establishes whether movement is seasonal or progressive, whether the footing is the problem, whether a tree or a leaking drain is involved and what class of repair is actually required. Pay for it and you go into the quoting process understanding the problem. Avoid it and the usual sequence is two cosmetic repairs followed by the engineer's fee anyway, which costs around twice as much and loses a season along the way.

Access and the smaller lines fill in the rest. Reckon $900 to $4,500 on scaffold according to the wall and the time, $18 to $45 a metre to reopen weepholes, and waste removal on a demolition $400 to $1,600 for ordinary material with brick rubble at the heavier end because it is dense. Matching bricks for a repair may need to be bought from a recycler at a premium, and on an unusual brick the search itself takes time somebody has to be paid for. Cream Hawthorn bricks and the older Melbourne reds are both sought after and priced accordingly. Allow for the sourcing as a separate line rather than assuming it sits inside the rate. A brick that has to be hunted down is a cost nobody can predict in advance.

Two savings are worth planning for rather than hoping for. Sharing one scaffold hire across the brickwork, the upper windows, the fascia and any high painting costs a fraction of erecting it separately for each trade, and on a two storey job that is usually the largest available saving. And a handful of spare bricks kept from the original build or from a demolition batch will match a future repair in a way nothing bought later can, since colour and size vary between production runs. A dozen bricks under the house is worth more than any warranty on this material. Wrap them and label them with the year.

What to Look Out For

Nothing signals trouble on brickwork faster than a price to fill a crack from somebody incurious about its cause. Cracking in Victorian brick walls is usually the footing reporting on the soil, and a repair that addresses the gap without addressing the movement will reopen on the same seasonal timetable. Anybody pricing a crack repair should be asking when it appeared, whether it changes through the year and what sits near the house. If none of those questions come up, the quote is for cosmetics. Cosmetic work has its place, provided everybody knows that is what it is.

Be very careful with a repointing quote on a house built before about 1920 that does not mention lime. A hard cement mortar in a soft old wall transfers the damage from the joint to the brick face, and the result is irreversible in a way that a bad repoint in cement mortar on a modern wall is not. Get the proposed mix named along with the reasoning behind it. A conservation bricklayer will answer with a mix and a reason, and a general bricklayer who has not thought about it will answer with a brand.

Watch for a lintel replacement with no mention of what goes above the new steel. A damp proof course and flashing over the lintel is what stops water sitting on it, and a replacement fitted without one will corrode again on the same schedule as the original. The same applies to the specification of the steel itself, where hot dip galvanised to a heavy coating or stainless is the right answer and a light galvanised angle is simply repeating the problem at your expense. Near the bay, stainless is the only sensible choice rather than an upgrade. Inland a heavy hot dip coating will see the rest of the building out. Either way, ask what coating weight is being supplied rather than accepting galvanised as an answer.

Look at the bottom of the wall before anybody quotes anything. Weepholes covered by paving, soil, mulch or a render coat, and a damp proof course bridged by a path poured against the brickwork, account for an enormous share of the damp complaints in this state and they cost very little to correct. A contractor who quotes internal plaster repairs without walking outside to look at the ground level has diagnosed the symptom. Correcting the ground first is almost always the cheaper half of the job.

Finally, take bulging or leaning brickwork seriously and do not accept a cosmetic answer for it. A veneer skin is held upright by its ties and nothing else, so a wall out of plumb, bowing outward, or cracking horizontally at regular vertical intervals is a structural matter for an engineer rather than a bricklayer. Nobody should be rendering, painting or patching that wall until somebody qualified has looked at why it is moving. Covering a bowing wall with render makes the next assessment harder and the eventual repair dearer. It also removes the evidence of how fast it was moving.

How to Get Comparable Quotes

Begin with the age of the house and what the wall is doing, because those two facts shape every answer that follows. Say roughly when it was built, whether you believe it is veneer or solid, where the problem is and how long it has been there. Hand over whatever you have spotted already, the brown stain over the window head, the gap that shuts by June, the concrete somebody laid up against the brickwork, because a difficulty in plain sight gets costed as labour while a concealed one gets costed as exposure. Saying it at the first visit is the least expensive advantage available to an owner. A contractor kept in the dark builds their protection into the figure.

Then hand every contractor the same set of questions. Which wall type they have identified, what they think caused the problem, whether an engineer is needed, the mortar specification and why, the steel specification on any lintel work, what goes above a new lintel, how weepholes and ground level are being dealt with, the brick matching arrangement, access, waste, spares and the warranty. Putting it the same way each time is what makes the spread between the figures mean anything. Get the list on paper before the first visit instead of inventing it three separate times. That quarter hour comes back many times over.

Put it to each of them: what would you need to look at before you would stand behind a number? Anyone who has worked old masonry will want the crack watched across a season, or a joint raked open to see what mortar is in there, or the paving lifted to expose the base course. Someone happy to quote the lot from a photograph has not inspected anything. That one question thins the field more effectively than any other on the list, and it also reveals who will be easy to deal with once the job begins.

Lay the approaches side by side and come to the bottom lines afterwards. Two contractors who have landed on the same cause, the same mix, the same steel, the same detail over the opening and the same work at ground level are competing honestly, and the difference tells you something. A figure that sits below the rest by exactly the engineer's fee, the lime mix and the flashing has priced another job entirely, one the earlier sections describe by its third summer. Take what is missing back to whoever wrote it and watch the number.

Hold on to the record and put it somewhere it outlives the current ownership. Brick type and source, the mortar mix and colour, the steel specification on any lintel, the engineer's report and drawing where there was one, the crack monitoring photographs with their dates, and pictures of ties and flashings before the brickwork closed over them. Nothing else will ever show what went inside that wall. Anybody inspecting the place before a sale reads a folder like that as evidence of care, and a wall with a paper trail moves faster than one without.