Garden wall pointing / capping advice needed

[jonnyi_uk99]

Good evening all,

I’m hoping to get some general advice on a project I’m planning.

I bought a house last year that has a 2 foot retaining wall between the decking and the lawn. It’s a red brick wall and looks to be in pretty bad shape.

• Normal red brick used to cap the wall are all crumbling
• Some whole sections appear to be quite loose
• Could be leaking through from behind?

I haven’t done much of this kind of work before so I’d love to get some feedback on my plan to correct this to understand if I’m along the right lines.

I was planning to firstly rake back all the cement and repoint with another cement mix (maybe 4 to 1 mix). I was intending to do the whole wall so it matches.
Then I want to chisel off the current capping bricks and replace them with blue engineering bricks.

I’m hoping this might be enough but I’m worried it won’t address the underlying problem if there is water coming in from behind the wall, some of the marks down the wall look like it’s been leaking, if that’s the case I’m not really sure what to do. Maybe dig down behind the wall and see what’s going on?

Cheers for any comments / advice

Jonny