Chimney Repair and Rebuilding in Syracuse and Onondaga County

It is decided by how far down the damage has reached and by whether the stack is moving. Soft joints on brick that is still hard is a repointing job. A cracked crown with a few soft courses under it is a top rebuild. Brick spalling several feet down means water has been in the stack for years and the rebuild starts at the roofline. A lean is none of those: the code requires the footing to sit on natural undisturbed earth or engineered fill below frost depth, so a tilting stack is usually telling you about its footing and the opened joints are the symptom. Preservation Brief 2's threshold is useful here too. Once 25 to 50 percent or more of the masonry needs work, doing it all can cost less than chasing spots, and on a chimney that point arrives sooner because the scaffold is paid for either way.

Access, and the regulation behind it. Labor is roughly 80 to 90 percent of masonry repair cost and the material is 10 to 20 percent, and cost guides note masons charging more past about eight feet because the work gets harder to reach. OSHA then requires every worker on a scaffold more than 10 feet above a lower level to be protected from falling, so a chimney needs a scaffold erected, inspected and fitted with fall protection before a brick is touched, and none of that appears in the finished stack. It is also why phasing a masonry budget is a real decision rather than a delay tactic: the parts of the house you can reach from the ground are genuinely cheap to keep up, and the chimney never will be.

It depends which counter your address answers to, and there is no single one for this metro. New York requires every city, village, town and county responsible for enforcing the Uniform Code to establish its own enforcement program by local law, so the authority is your village if you are inside an incorporated village and your town otherwise. The regulation lets a jurisdiction exempt repairs from the permit requirement, but only where it wrote that exemption into its own program, and the exemption cannot reach work affecting the structural system. The Village of Liverpool requires a permit for the alteration or improvement of any portion of a structure and has a separate heating appliance and chimney application. DeWitt names fireplaces on its permit page and will not take an application without workers compensation and disability proof or a signed Certificate of Attestation of Exemption. And an exemption from a permit has never been an exemption from the code itself, so do not accept an assurance without a name at the counter.

The code describes a concrete, metal or stone cap with a drip edge and a caulked break around the flue liners, sloped to shed water, and it sets a net free area of at least four times the flue outlet for a spark arrestor or a rain cap. Three things to look for from the ground or from a photograph. The cap should overhang the brick rather than finish flush with it, so runoff drops clear instead of tracking back down the face. There should be a visible joint where it meets the liner rather than mortar poured tight against it, because the two need to move independently. And it should not be cracked. What is usually up there is a flat mortar wash troweled onto the top courses and hard against the liner, and once that cracks the water goes into the chimney instead of off it. That is why chimneys fail from the top down.

Often it is the flashing rather than the masonry, so get that looked at before anyone quotes a rebuild. New York's code requires approved corrosion resistant flashing, applied shingle fashion, at the intersection of chimneys with frame or stucco walls, and it requires a cricket where the chimney is more than 30 inches across parallel to the ridgeline and does not intersect the ridge. With a normal 123.8 inches of snow a year, a wide stack sitting below the ridge with no cricket has a drift piled against the same face every winter. A rebuild over bad flashing leaks in exactly the same place, and you will have paid for the brick to find that out.

Not if the faces are coming off, because then the joints are the cause rather than the casualty. A mortar less permeable than the brick forces moisture out through the face of the unit, where it deposits salts under the fired skin, and those crystallize and pop the surface off. The National Park Service publishes a photograph of exactly that result with the caption naming hard portland cement mortar less permeable than the soft bricks as the cause, and describing water pressure eventually popping the surface off the bricks. Repointing that wall the same way repeats it. The failed units need replacing and the mix needs reconsidering at the same time, which is why this quote is worth reading for what it says about the mortar and not only about the brick count.