Had to replace all these bricks. Sprinklers kept soaking bricks and got rebar wet. It rusted and destroyed the bricks. The black stains are from creosote/soot/smoke/ hot gases escaping flue and firebox, potentially getting into combustibles and house fire.
In an area where earthquakes are not uncommon, it is important to repair your chimney as soon as cracks appear. An un-repaired, unstable chimney is much more likely to sustain unrepairable damage during even a minor earthquake.
Here is a rebuild of a chimney we did.
The purpose of your chimney is to properly vent the products of combustion (smoke) form your home. However, if the integrity of a chimney is compromised, say from a crack, this can be an issue.
If smoke and combustion materials are not vented away from your home they can build up in said cracks, thus causing fire hazards.
Cracks are one of the most common masonry chimney issues!
We can repair most problems with chimneys including relining the flue, replacing a damaged damper with a top damper, repairing cracks in the fireplace, replacing gas lines, rebuilding the chimney crown and fixing exterior cracks in chimneys. It is important to get minor problems repaired before they become major expensive repairs.
Perhaps you have a fireplace but you haven’t used it in years or even decades, and it may be in such a state of disrepair that you are afraid you might never get to use it again. We can restore that chimney, see our before and after masonry repair job below.
It is important to repair your chimney as soon as cracks appear. Here is a before and after of a masonry chimney repair we did.
Here is a chimney masonry repair we recently did. See the below before and after photos.
We recently completed some chimney repair jobs and below are the before and afters.
This is a video of a home in San Juan Capistrano that is approximately 40 years old. All 3 chimneys had severe cracks and gaps in the chimney flue. This is a severe fire hazard if the fireplaces are used to burn wood or gas fires. If you are purchasing a home that was built over 20 years ago, don’t take a chance that the chimney will not have gaps.
Approximately 40% of the homes that were built in the 1980s and earlier have cracks and gaps within the chimney flues. Regular home inspectors do not inspect the chimneys with a video camera and as a result most of the cracks are not detected. Approximately 15,000 homes per year in the U.S. have home fires which start in the fireplace/chimney.
Here is a recent chimney repair we did.
