Chimney repair, rebuilds and new chimneys
A chimney takes weather on all four sides and gets looked at by nobody. We repair them, rebuild them from the roofline up, and build them new.
Why chimneys go before the rest of the house
Every other wall on your house has a roof over it. The chimney does not. It is a masonry column standing above the roofline getting rain on four sides, wind that the rest of the building is sheltered from, and the full swing of the freeze-thaw cycle with nothing above it.
So chimneys age faster than the house they are attached to, and because nobody is at eye level with one, the damage is usually well advanced before anyone notices. The first sign for most people is not the chimney at all — it is a brown stain on an upstairs ceiling.
The crown is usually the culprit
The crown is the concrete cap across the top of the stack. It is meant to shed water off the top and away. When it cracks — and they all crack eventually — water goes straight down inside the chimney, between the flue and the brick, where nothing is designed to be wet.
From there it works outward into the stack, freezes, and starts pushing the brickwork apart from the inside. A cracked crown caught early is a modest repair. A cracked crown left for five winters is a rebuild, because by then the brick it has been soaking has gone soft.
What we do to chimneys
- Repointing the stack — the same tuckpointing work as any wall, done on the most exposed masonry on the building
- Crown repair and replacement — recasting the cap so it sheds water properly again
- Partial rebuilds — taking the stack down to the roofline where it is sound and rebuilding from there up
- Full rebuilds — where the damage runs below the roofline
- Flashing — the metal seal where the chimney meets the roof, and a very common leak point
- New chimneys — built from scratch, not just repaired
Building a chimney new
Not every chimney job is a repair. We build them new — for additions, for a new appliance that needs its own flue, and for houses where the original chimney is too far gone to be worth rebuilding piecemeal and it makes more sense to start over.
It is worth saying plainly because a lot of masonry outfits will only patch what is there. Between the two, building new is the less common skill and it is one this crew has.
The flashing question
Where a chimney passes through a roof there is a metal flashing detail sealing the joint. It is the single most common place for a chimney-adjacent leak, and it sits exactly on the line between two trades — which is why it so often gets blamed on whichever contractor is not in the room.
We do both. If we are on your roof for the roof we will look at the chimney, and if we are on the chimney we will look at the flashing. Nobody gets to point at anybody else.
Get a chimney price
Estimates are free and there is no obligation attached to one. Tell us what you are seeing and we will tell you what it actually needs.
A chimney taken back and rebuilt
The brick on this stack had broken down badly enough that patching it would have been throwing money at it. It came apart, went back up, and got a new crown across the top — which is the part that stops the next twenty winters getting inside.
