Question answered
Can you repoint a chimney yourself?
The short answer
You can repoint a chimney yourself in the sense that the skill is learnable, but we would not advise it. The stack stands at the highest and most exposed point of the house, the work needs a proper scaffold platform rather than a ladder, and a poor joint or the wrong mortar causes damp and damage later. Checking the stack from the ground is sensible. Working on it is a job for a roofer.
Repointing a garden wall is a weekend job. A chimney stack is the same craft carried out two storeys up, in the wind, with nowhere to put your feet. That changes the answer.
A stack is the worst place to learn the craft
Repointing means raking out the old, failed mortar from the joints and pressing in new mortar so water cannot get behind the brick. On a wall at head height it is forgiving. On a chimney stack it is not. The stack rises above the ridge, so it takes the full force of any wind off the sea, and the top courses are narrow, often only a brick or two across.
You also need both hands free for hours. A hawk of mortar, a pointing trowel, a raking tool and a brush all have to be held, set down and picked up again while you balance. People get hurt when they reach, lean or step back without thinking. Brickwork that has already weakened can shift under a hand or a boot, and a loose brick at that height comes down onto a path, a car or a person.
None of that is a problem on the ground, which is why the skill is not the real barrier. The setting is.
Why a ladder is not a working platform
A ladder is for getting to a place, not for working from it. Leant against a stack it rests on brickwork that may be loose, it cannot reach the far faces, and it gives you no rail to hold. Roof ladders hooked over a ridge are no better for this task, because the ridge tiles themselves can be the weak point.
Roofers handle this with scaffolding, and for a chimney that often means a tower or a scaffold lift built to reach the top of the stack with boards and guard rails. A scaffold standing over the public footway needs a highways licence, which the scaffold firm arranges, and part of the stack's cost comes from how awkward it is to reach. Our page on what chimney repairs cost explains what moves the price.
If a quote you are given leaves out the scaffold or VAT, ask. Both change the total.
Mortar that looks right and does harm
The choice of mortar counts for as much as the pointing technique. Older brick and stone often sit in a soft lime mortar that lets moisture escape through the joints. Fill those joints with hard cement mortar and the water has nowhere to go but through the brick, which then flakes at the face. The fix ends up causing the damage it was meant to prevent.
A mix chosen by eye from a builders' merchant is easy to get wrong. So is the depth of the raking out: too shallow and the new mortar falls out within a few winters, too deep and you disturb the bed beneath. Joint finish counts too. A flat or proud finish holds water on the face, where a slightly recessed one sheds it.
Weather finishes the job badly if you are unlucky. Mortar that is rained on before it sets, or dried fast in wind and sun, comes out weak and powdery.
When the pointing is not the real fault
Many stacks that look as if they need repointing have a second problem hiding in plain sight. The flaunching, the mortar collar that seats the pots at the top, may have cracked. A flashing may have lifted where the stack leaves the roof. The bricks themselves may be spalling after frost. Pointing the joints and leaving those alone means water keeps arriving.
Finding where it gets in is the part a surveyor does well, and it is hard to do from a ladder. Before any mortar goes on, the aim is to trace the wet patch to where the water enters, then deal with that and the joints together.
Other work often goes alongside it. A bracket from an old television aerial can lever at brickwork in wind, which we cover in is a TV aerial damaging my chimney?. A coat of render sometimes hides a stack that is failing underneath, as our page on rendering sets out.
What you can safely do from the ground
A good deal of the useful checking needs no ladder. Look at the stack from the garden or street, ideally with binoculars, in dry light. Note mortar that has gone missing or turned sandy, bricks with flaked faces, a stack that leans, and any green growth. Check the loft below the chimney for brown tide marks on the timbers or a damp smell. Look on the ground for crumbs of mortar after a gale.
Take photographs, because they let a roofer see the problem before visiting. Do not sweep up fallen bricks and bin them without looking at where they came from.
If the stack is tall and you are weighing up shortening it instead, reducing a chimney's height is another job altogether, with rules of its own. Everything we do on stacks is listed on our chimney repairs page. If you would rather have it done, a survey ends with pictures of the brickwork and a written, single-figure quote.
Trowel in hand: two follow-up questions
Will repointing the chimney myself save money?
The materials cost little, but the scaffold or tower needed to work safely does not, and a failed job has to be raked out and redone. MyBuilder's cost guide (updated 21 August 2026) quotes a typical UK price of around £750 to repoint a chimney, with a spread from £500 to £2,000. Our written quote follows a survey.
Can I repoint just the bottom of the stack from the loft or roof edge?
Only the part you can reach without leaning over open space is a candidate, and the weakest brickwork is usually the top courses, which take the weather. Pointing the lower part and leaving the top alone rarely cures a damp patch. A surveyor will look at the whole stack before suggesting a repair.
Tell us about your roof
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