Chimney Masonry Repair in Cerritos, CA

Chimney Masonry Repair for Cerritos Homeowners

Cerritos is the most uniform housing stock we work in, and that makes it easy to predict. This was Dairy Valley until 1967, and what replaced the dairies was two decades of continuous tract building through to the mid-eighties. The consequence for us is that Cerritos is factory-built country. The great majority of these fireplaces are prefabricated metal units venting through a Class A metal chimney inside a framed and stuccoed chase, not full masonry. They fail completely differently. There is no mortar to repoint and no crown to recast; instead there is a galvanised sheet chase cover on top, and after forty years those have almost universally rusted, ponded and started leaking straight down inside the chase where nobody can see it. The water then rots the framing and corrodes the chimney sections. We replace a great many chase covers in stainless here. The other Cerritos issue is age of appliance: a 1978 factory-built firebox has a service life, and refractory panels that have cracked through are not repairable by patching.

1965-1985 tract housing, predominantly factory-built fireboxes in stuccoed chases with rusting galvanised chase covers.

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.