Chimney Repair and Rebuilding

Yes. Fackrell Masonry and Construction covers all of Southern Idaho, between the Oregon and Wyoming borders. That reaches as far north as McCall, Stanley, New Meadows and Salmon. I work from Nampa in the Treasure Valley and Blackfoot in eastern Idaho, and the work carries a workmanship warranty you'll know the terms of before you sign anything. Start with a quote by clicking here.

Two different trades, and mixing them up is one of the more expensive mistakes people make with a chimney.

A chimney sweep deals with what's inside. Creosote and soot out of the liner so the thing doesn't catch fire, and a look at whether it's safe to burn. That's their trade and it isn't mine.

I deal with the chimney itself. The brick, the mortar joints, the crown on top, the top section of liner. Whether it's standing up straight and whether it's shedding water.

The rough sort is this. Smoke, smell, or a safety check before burning season, call a sweep. Something you can see from the yard, loose brick, crumbs on the roof, a cracked top, a lean, call a mason.

Where it goes wrong is hiring a sweep to do the masonry. Plenty of them will take the work, and repointing and crown work are not what they do all day. I get called out to put it right often enough to say so plainly. You can usually spot it from the sidewalk too, because mortar ends up smeared across the brick faces, and once that has cured into the brick nothing will take it off.

Plenty of chimneys need both trades, and there's no conflict in that. Just don't hire one expecting the other's work.

One more thing, and it's the part most people skip. Be careful with "well, we have a mason." Ask who that mason actually is, what he's built, and how long he's been doing it. Then ask for the state registration number and go look it up yourself at the Idaho Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses. Idaho requires registration for construction work over a dollar threshold that almost any masonry job clears, and the registration names the trade. Masonry should be on it.

No registration on a job that size isn't a technicality, it's against the law, and I'd run. Registered under a handyman code tells you something too. A handyman registration is not a masonry qualification. Nobody sits an exam for it, and being a handyman doesn't stop somebody taking on your masonry repair. It just means you're the one carrying the risk.

So treat the number as the floor instead of the finish line. Check it, then still ask what he's built.

It comes down to how much damage there is, and what a repair would cost against what a rebuild would cost. Mortar is the easy part. Joints wash out, joints get repointed, and on its own that rarely means a rebuild. Brick is what decides it. Once enough of the brick has gone, replacing it piece by piece costs more than taking the chimney down to the roofline and building it back. At that point the rebuild is the cheaper job as well as the better one. That call gets made after somebody has actually been up there and looked.

Treat it that way until somebody has looked at it. A stack that's moving is a stack that can come down, and it doesn't give much notice.

Two very different things cause it. One is the masonry. Joints have washed out far enough that the stack isn't acting as one piece anymore, and the top half goes where gravity sends it. That's my work.

The other is what's underneath. If the footing under the chimney has settled or heaved, the chimney is going along for the ride and the house isn't. I've been out to chimneys separating from a house where no amount of masonry would have solved it, because the masonry was never the problem. Rebuilding a stack on a footing that's still moving only resets the clock.

Here's how to read yours. Look at the gap where the chimney meets the wall of the house. If it's wider at the top than at the bottom and it's opening up over time, that's the second kind. Take a photo today with a tape measure in the shot, and take the same photo in a month.

Could be either, and it's worth knowing which before you pay anybody.

Water at a chimney has three usual doors. The top, where a cracked or thin crown lets it straight down into the stack. The brick and the joints, where washed-out mortar lets it soak in from the side. And the flashing, which is the metal where the chimney meets the roof. The first two are mine. The third is roofing.

The stain on your ceiling won't tell you which one it is, because water runs sideways along framing before it shows up inside. Somebody has to get up there and look at all three.

Sorting that out before anybody starts is the difference between fixing it once and paying for it twice. I'd rather send you back to your roofer than sell you a repointing job that doesn't dry the ceiling.

Efflorescence. Salt, carried out of the masonry by water moving through it and left on the face when the water evaporates.

The powder itself is harmless. What it's telling you isn't. Water is getting into that chimney and traveling through the brick, and on a chimney the usual way in is the top. A cracked crown, a thin wash that's let go, or joints washed out far enough to drink.

Don't count on it washing off, either. Some of it does and some of it never will. Try a small amount of water and a brush first, and small is deliberate, because water is the thing causing this in the first place and soaking the chimney to clean it makes the problem worse than the stain.

So don't treat it as a cleaning problem. Scrubbing it off and sealing over it puts a lid on water that's still arriving, and that's worse than leaving it alone. Find the way in, close it, and the bloom stops coming back on its own.

If it keeps returning after a rebuild or a repoint, something is still open up top.

Usually the top, and usually because whatever is up there was built thin.

There are two ways to finish a chimney. A crown is cast concrete, reinforced, sloped away from the flue and projecting past the brick with a drip groove underneath, and the Brick Industry Association puts it at two inches minimum in Technical Notes 19B. On most chimneys that's the right answer. A wash is material troweled over the top instead, and there are chimneys where a wash is the right answer, usually where a crown would ruin what the original mason built.

The trouble is that almost nobody builds a wash properly. It gets feathered out to a knife edge at the brick, and a knife edge of anything cracks in the first hard freeze. Water gets in, runs down the face of the brick, and takes the joints with it. The material matters as much as the thickness. Plain mortar has very little strength in a thin section, so a wash made out of it cracks even where nobody feathered it.

That's where a cheap price comes from. The top of a chimney is the one part of your house you'll never climb up and look at, and a bad wash looks respectable from the ground for the first few winters.

Not a number I can put on a page, and I'd be careful with anybody who gives you one over the phone.

What moves it is access and what's under the old crown. A single story with a walkable roof and sound brick underneath is one job. A steep two story needing scaffold or a lift is another, and getting up there can cost more than the masonry does. Then there's what the old crown was hiding. Where water has been getting in for years the top few courses are usually loose, and those get reset or rebuilt first. There's no point casting a good crown onto brick that's already letting go.

What I'll say plainly is that a crown is cheap next to what it protects. It's a day or so of work. A rebuild above the roofline is a different order of money altogether, and a bad crown is the most common reason people end up buying one.

Sometimes, and only the top section of each flue. When the crown comes off, the top section is the part that's taken the weather, and if it needs replacing I replace it. Clay liners I can usually source. The old pumice ones aren't made anymore, so on a pumice flue the answer is almost always a repair. The sections below the top are built into the stack, and reaching them means taking the chimney apart, which is a rebuild rather than a repair. I'll tell you that up front instead of after.

Yes, and it's worth sorting out which cap you mean, because two different things go by that name and people end up talking past each other.

A chimney cap, in most people's usage, is the metal piece sitting on top of the flue liner. It keeps rain out of the flue, keeps birds and squirrels from setting up in there, and usually carries a spark arrestor. I install those.

The other thing called a cap is the masonry on top of the stack, which in the trade is a crown or a wash. That's the slab covering the brickwork itself, and it's the part that decides how long the chimney lasts. There's a question further up this page about why.

So both are mine. Tell me your cap is rusted through and I'll picture the metal one. Tell me your cap is cracked and crumbling and I'll picture the masonry. Send a photo and neither of us has to guess.

No, and a mason who says otherwise hasn't looked at your chimney yet.

A cast crown, two inches minimum with a drip edge, is my standard, and on most chimneys it's plainly the right thing to build. Two situations change that.

The first is a historic building, where the chimney has to stay in its original configuration. What the original mason built is the specification, and a modern crown isn't part of it.

The second is a chimney whose top courses are corbelled, meaning the brick steps out course by course to form the finished top. That corbelling is the detail the chimney was designed around, and setting a slab with a drip edge on top of it takes that away and, in my opinion, makes the chimney look wrong.

So it's a judgment call, and making it is a good part of what you're paying a professional for. Where the brick can be protected without erasing the original mason's work, that's the way to go.

It can, and it does. Snow lets go off a metal roof all at once and there's nothing gentle about it. I've rebuilt several chimneys that lost the argument, including cabins where the top of the stack ended up out in the yard.

The pattern is nearly always the same. Metal roof, a chimney sitting downhill of a long run of it, and no cricket built above the stack to split the load and send it around. A cricket is a small ridged structure behind the chimney that does exactly that. Where one is missing, rebuilding the masonry without getting a cricket added is just scheduling the next rebuild. A cricket is roofing work instead of masonry, so it's a call to make with your roofer, and better made before the chimney goes back up than after.