DIY advice for fitting coping stones.

[MrBirling]

In my garden I have a lot of natural stone built raised beds. The walls of these are sound but in places the coping stones on the top are loose. DH 'fixed' some last year and made a total mess. The wall stone is sandstone and the mortar is all buff coloured. DH used grey mortar and was a little slap dash and free form in his application. I want to have a go at fixing some of the others. It's not something I've ever done before .

So how hard is making buff coloured mortar and fitting some coping stones back onto a wall? Any tips? Or would it be worth paying a professional?

If they are sandstone then I suspect that it might be lime mortar. Using cement will eventually damage the stone because it is harder than the stone is. Lime is pretty easy to work with but you need the weather to be above freezing and you need to wear goggles and skin protection as its not great if you get it on your skin. You can buy premixed tubs but the delivery costs are pricey or you can mix it up yourself but I don't know much about that. Hopefully a lime pointing nerd will be along to offer some more advice. If not then there will be some posts on period property forum.co.uk which will help you work out which lime product you need.

Just go to Wickes and buy some buff mortar dye, it's in the aisle with all the sand and cement etc.
Follow the instructions and you can even do some samples if you're not sure.
Adding lime as suggested above does lighten things but the mortar dye works for me. Matches sandstone slabs pretty well at the standard concentration.
It'll never perfectly match due to variations in sand colour though.
4 to 1 mix of building sand and cement, SBR+cement powder slurry on the bricks just before you apply the mortar, and it should be ok.

But warning don't spill or splash the SBR mix and if you do wash it off immediately as it never ever comes off the face of the bricks!

Yep I think this is what DH failed to do. So need to make sure I have a bucket and sponge.

I'm going to have a go at it. I've a lot that need doing so I'll start with ones that are a bit hidden so I can practice. But I'll wait until it warms up a bit. Thanks all.

I meant use lime mortar, which you can only buy from specialist places like mike Wye online. Not add lime to normal mortar. As I mentioned before, cement based mortar will lead to long term damage of the sandstone because it is harder than the stone.