February is when people finally see what the winter did. The frosts have finished their work, the light is improving, and suddenly the front wall looks wrong and half the flags on the path are sitting proud of the others. Frost damage repairs are a small job by volume and a heavy one by weight, which is a combination that catches people out when they book a skip. Our Penwortham skip hire service handles a lot of these through late winter.
What frost actually does to brickwork
Brick is porous. It takes in water, and when that water freezes it expands by roughly a tenth of its volume. If it has soaked into the outer face of a brick and then frozen, something has to give, and what gives is the face of the brick. It blows off in flat plates, leaving the softer core exposed, which then absorbs more water and goes faster the following winter.
That process is called spalling and it is the single most common thing we see behind a February call about a garden wall. It concentrates where water collects, so the top course under a failed coping, the bottom two courses where the ground splashes back, and anywhere a downpipe has been discharging in the wrong place.
Older Penwortham walls built in lime mortar tend to cope better than you would expect, because lime is softer than the brick and takes the movement. Walls repointed at some stage in hard cement mortar do the opposite. The mortar is stronger than the brick, so the brick loses. If you have a wall where the pointing looks pristine and the bricks look terrible, that is usually why, and repointing it in cement again will produce the same result in another decade.
Paths, flags and heave
The other February phone call is about paving. Water gets into the sub-base, freezes, expands and lifts everything above it. When it thaws the ground settles back but not evenly, so flags end up at different heights and edges start to trip people.
The mistake here is relaying the flags without touching what is underneath. If the sub-base has failed, putting the same flags back on it gives you the same problem next winter. Around this part of the plain the ground holds water badly, and a path laid on nothing more than sand over subsoil will not survive many winters. If you are lifting it, lift it properly and put a decent compacted base under it.
Why a small job needs a bigger allowance than you expect
Here is where the skip planning goes wrong. A ten metre run of garden wall does not look like much waste. Broken brick, old mortar, a few coping stones and some concrete from the footing. Standing on the driveway it looks like it will barely cover the floor of a skip.
It will, and then it will be at the weight limit. Brick, mortar, stone and concrete are about as dense as domestic waste gets, and a skip taking demolition rubble reaches its limit while looking almost empty. Our page on skip size versus weight limits explains why the two constraints work independently.
For a job of this kind we would put in a 4 tonne midi skip rather than something larger, because you will run out of weight long before you run out of room, and there is no point paying for volume you cannot use. Spread the rubble across the floor of the skip in a thin even layer rather than tipping it all at one end.
Keep the rubble clean if you possibly can
Broken brick, block, concrete and stone are among the most recoverable materials we take. Crushed down, clean hardcore goes straight back out as usable material rather than being disposed of. That only holds while the load stays clean.
The temptation on a job like this is to throw the old timber gate, the bags of garden rubbish and the offcuts of membrane in with the rubble because they are all in the same corner of the garden. Resist it. One bin bag turns an inert load into a mixed one, and our environmental and recycling page explains what the difference means once it reaches our site.
Old bricks in reasonable condition are worth setting aside separately as well. Reclaimed Lancashire brick has a value and plenty of people want it for garden projects, so it is worth an advert before it goes in a skip.
Timing the repair
Do not rush to rebuild in February. New mortar needs temperatures above freezing to cure properly, and mortar laid in a cold snap and then frosted overnight will be weak for the rest of its life. If you rebuild a wall in the first week of February and it frosts hard that night, you have wasted the work.
The sensible sequence is to demolish, clear and prepare through February, then build once the overnight temperatures have settled. That also suits the skip, because you can have it for the demolition phase and then get on with the building without a container sitting on your drive doing nothing.
Where the skip goes and whether you need a permit
Most properties around here have driveway room, which keeps things simple. Where the skip has to go on the road, Lancashire County Council acts as the highway authority under the Highways Act 1980, the fee is £36 per month, and our guide to whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire covers what is involved.
One February consideration on the driveway. Ground that has been frozen and thawed repeatedly all winter is softer than it looks even where the surface seems sound. Our drivers carry boards and will use them, but mention it if your drive is block paved and you are protective of it.
Local coverage
We work across this side of the Ribble daily, running Leyland skip hire and Longton skip hire jobs alongside Penwortham, and our drivers know the older streets and the tighter access well enough to plan for it.
Ring us on 01772 364399 and describe the wall or the path rather than guessing at a size. Rubble is the one material where getting it wrong is expensive, and a two minute conversation sorts it. Our contact page is there if you would rather send a photograph of the damage.
