Chimney Masonry Repair in Artesia, CA

Chimney Masonry Repair 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.

Masonry chimneys in this county fail from the top down and from water, not from fire. The crown cracks, rain gets into the brickwork, and then the marine layer keeps it from ever fully drying. Wet mortar in a coastal-influenced climate goes soft and sandy, the joints open, and the freeze-thaw cycle people assume is a cold-climate problem happens here too on a smaller scale — enough to spall the face off brick over twenty years. Near the water it is worse. Salt air across Long Beach, Torrance and Palos Verdes drives chloride into the mortar and corrodes anything ferrous inside the stack. The other half of our repair work is seismic. A chimney is a heavy unreinforced cantilever bolted to a light wood house, which is why it is the first thing to crack in a quake and why so much of the pre-1960 brick around Whittier and Long Beach is carrying old damage that was patched cosmetically and never actually repaired.