Chimney Inspections in Artesia, CA

Chimney Inspections for Artesia Homeowners

Artesia is barely two square miles and it keeps the shape of the Dutch dairy town it was before the tracts arrived. There is an older core of modest early houses, a good deal of 1950s infill, and the Pioneer Boulevard commercial strip that gives the city its present character. For our purposes Artesia is a city of small, plain masonry chimneys that have had very little attention. These are not elaborate stacks, and that works in an owner's favour: repairs here tend to be modest and affordable when they are caught. The problem is that a small chimney on a small house is exactly the one nobody thinks about, so we frequently arrive to find a flue that has never been swept, no cap, and a decade of nesting material sitting on the smoke shelf. The other Artesia pattern is multi-generational households and rental property, where the person burning fires is not the person who would arrange maintenance. If a fireplace in Artesia is being used at all, an inspection is worth doing before the first cold week.

A small dairy-town core with 1950s infill, modest masonry stacks, and a high rate of never-swept, uncapped flues.

An inspection is the only part of this trade that tells you something you could not otherwise know. A flue can look perfectly sound from the hearth and be cracked through two storeys up. That matters more here than in most of the country because of what the ground does. The 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake put hairline shears through masonry across the Whittier and Pico Rivera area that have quietly widened ever since, and the Portuguese Bend slide is still moving under parts of Rancho Palos Verdes today. Add the ordinary rate of settlement in the postwar tracts built on old dairy and farm land in Cerritos, Artesia and Norwalk, and cracked flue tiles are common in houses that have never had a bad fire. We also do a lot of point-of-sale work. A Level 2 inspection is what a lender, an insurer or a careful buyer's agent will ask for, and a written report with photographs settles the question rather than starting an argument.