# Forum Home Renovation Brickwork  Repairing/patching internal brick wall

## Indian Stix

Hello all - This is my first post, and I guess I have a typical 'newbie' dumb question.  I am in a 1950s Canberra double brick house, and while installing curtain tracks, I have found a patch of internal wall around a wall vent which seems to be an old repair job - there is not much brick, but a lot of crumbly mortar.  It certainly won't hold the curtain track.  What is the best way to fix this - the rest of the wall is in good condition - but I need to patch/repair this area so that I can screw a bracket in to take the weight of some heavy curtains.

----------


## GeoffW1

> Hello all - This is my first post, and I guess I have a typical 'newbie' dumb question. I am in a 1950s Canberra double brick house, and while installing curtain tracks, I have found a patch of internal wall around a wall vent which seems to be an old repair job - there is not much brick, but a lot of crumbly mortar. It certainly won't hold the curtain track. What is the best way to fix this - the rest of the wall is in good condition - but I need to patch/repair this area so that I can screw a bracket in to take the weight of some heavy curtains.

  Hi, 
A typical problem in older brick places. It would be a rendered wall I think, and rendering hid much terrible brickwork. The crumbly stuff is likely to be a weak render mix or lime mortar. 
You could first try raking out all the crumbly stuff to a width of say 100mm and as deep as you can, both until you reach something a little firmer. Paint the inside of this hole with lots of dilute bondcrete or similar and let it soak in well, and dry.. Then patch the hole with a rendering mix, like "Render-it" or similar, with a little Bondcrete mixed in (not much). 
This might work but if they are heavy curtains it may not. 
I once got over this problem in a 1920 Federation place by using a very long masonry drill to drill right through the inner wall skin (which mostly was not whole bricks) and partly into the outer brick skin (which was of course face bricks), and then hammered in a length of oversized dowel rod, cut off flush, into which I screwed the curtain bracket screw. It remained solid for years. 
Cheers

----------

