The usual suspects
- Eroded mortar joints — rain drives into soft joints, freezes, and pops the mortar out. Repointing with the correct mix stops the rot; on older stacks that means lime mortar, not hard cement that damages the brick.
- Cracked flaunching — the mortar crown holding your pots. Once cracked, water pours straight into the stack.
- Failed lead flashing — where chimney meets roof. The single most common leak point on any house, and we rebuild it in proper stepped lead, not mastic and hope.
- Spalled bricks and leaning stacks — frost-damaged brick faces and movement that, past a point, means taking courses down and rebuilding.
Repoint, rebuild or take it down?
We'll always give you the straight answer. Sound structure with tired joints: repoint. Damaged upper courses: partial rebuild, reusing your bricks where they're good so the stack still matches the house. And if the chimney is redundant, badly failed, and you'd rather not maintain it forever — removing it below the roofline and tiling over is sometimes the most honest recommendation. Unused chimneys get capped and vented, keeping rain out while letting the stack breathe so damp doesn't appear in the bedroom below.
Photos before, during and after
You can't see your own chimney properly, which historically made chimney work a magnet for dodgy traders. Our answer is simple: photographs of everything. You'll see the defects before you approve the work, the stages as they happen, and the finished job — from a drone or the scaffold — before we ask for a penny of the balance.