Chimney sweep near you
We inspect, reline and sweep the small brick chimneys of Brooklyn, some of the oldest on the east side, on cottages and bungalows off SE Milwaukie Ave. The usual job is a camera look at a flue that has not been checked in decades.
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Brooklyn's oldest homes are workers' cottages and Victorian-era houses built after Giddeon Tibbets subdivided his land in 1868, many around a single brick stack that did several jobs: kitchen stove, parlor fireplace, and later a coal furnace.
The bungalows of the 1900s to 1920s added a second generation of brick, still on small lots and often still without a liner. By the 1920s the Ross Island Bridge had removed the old town square and McLoughlin Blvd had cut the neighborhood off from the river, so the houses that survive sit in a tight grid hemmed by the rail yard on the east.
Renters make up about 63 percent of Brooklyn households, which shapes the work: property managers book inspections, closed-up fireplaces turn up in rentals, and a sale brings the Level 2 camera check. The 2010s apartments near the SE 17th Ave Orange Line stations have gas fireplaces or none, and their calls are about dryer vents.
A Brooklyn chimney is typically one small brick stack, unlined, that once served a cottage kitchen stove and a parlor fireplace or a coal furnace, which can mean two or three openings into a single flue and brick that has taken rain since the 1890s.
Shared openings are the hazard specific to these houses: a stove thimble plastered over in a kitchen wall still connects to the flue the fireplace uses, and smoke or furnace gases follow the path of least resistance. The weather side of the brick is often spalled and the mortar sandy by now, and the oil-to-gas conversions of later decades left the furnace flue cold and open at the top.
Camera inspections and relines of 1890s flues, repointing, dampers for closed-up rental fireplaces and apartment dryer vents are the calls Brooklyn's housing stock produces.
The first visit to a Brooklyn cottage is almost always a Level 2 camera inspection, because a flue that has served a kitchen stove, a fireplace and a coal furnace over 130 years has openings and joints nobody alive has seen. We scan from the cap to the cleanout and map every opening into the flue before anyone talks about lighting it.
A stainless liner is what makes an 1890s Brooklyn flue usable again: it runs from the firebox to the top of the stack, sealed off from every old thimble and the abandoned furnace connection, and it is sized to the fireplace or the stove rather than to the oversized brick passage. Insulation goes around it where the clearances call for it.
Brick above the roofline on the oldest Brooklyn houses has lost its mortar to more than a century of rain, and the faces on the wet side have spalled. We repoint with a mortar soft enough for old brick, replace the worst units, and rebuild the top courses and crown where they have come apart.
Closed-up fireplaces in Brooklyn rentals often have a throat damper rusted open or missing, which leaves the flue as an open pipe through the building. A top-sealing damper installed at the cap closes it with a gasket, keeps rain and animals out, and stops the cold draft tenants complain about.
The apartment buildings that went up near the 17th Ave MAX stops in the 2010s have no chimneys to sweep, but they hold many dryers venting through long ducts. We clean those runs to the exterior hood and clear the hood itself, which is where the lint piles up first.
Brooklyn is close in, reached from McLoughlin Blvd (OR 99E) or from US 26 at Powell Blvd, with SE Milwaukie Ave and SE 17th Ave carrying us north and south and SE Holgate Blvd crossing the rail yard on the east.
The lots are small, so parking is usually at the curb among the neighbors' cars. Tell us when you book whether the chimney is on the street side or the back of the house, and whether there is a gap between houses wide enough to carry a ladder through, which on some Brooklyn blocks there is not.
Giddeon Tibbets subdivided his land here in 1868, and the area was called Brookland before it became Brooklyn.
In the 1920s the Ross Island Bridge took out the old town square, and McLoughlin Blvd severed the neighborhood from the Willamette.
The Brooklyn rail yard on the east edge has housed the Southern Pacific 4449 steam locomotive.
The MAX Orange Line, finished in September 2015, stops at SE 17th and Holgate and at SE 17th and Rhine.
Residents orient by Brooklyn Park, Sacred Heart Catholic Church and the Aladdin Theater, all off Milwaukie, and by the Original Hotcake House; former mayor Tom Potter began his police career walking a beat here.
Yes, all of Brooklyn is covered, from Powell down to the Sellwood line and from McLoughlin over to the rail yard. The posted price applies with nothing added for travel when we do the work. The small size of the neighborhood means we may already be nearby on a Sellwood or Eastmoreland job, which helps when you need a date.
That plate covers an old stove thimble, the opening where a kitchen stove pipe once entered the chimney, and it matters a great deal. Behind the cover the thimble may still open into the same flue your fireplace uses, so fireplace smoke can leak into the kitchen. A camera inspection maps every such opening, and a liner seals them all out of the new flue path.
Seal them if nobody will use them, but do it properly. An unused fireplace with a rusted throat damper is an open pipe pulling heated air out of the building and rain and birds in, so the minimum is a top-sealing damper or a cap and a sealed firebox, with the flue inspected first so you know nothing else vents into it. If a tenant wants to burn, a Brooklyn flue needs a camera check and probably a liner first.
We seal the firebox opening and run brushes sized to the flue from the top or the bottom with a vacuum catching everything. Then we clean the smoke shelf, damper and firebox and photograph the flue before and after. Expect roughly an hour for a single flue on a Brooklyn cottage, longer if the stack has a second flue we are also looking down. The Level 1 look-over of the parts we can reach comes with it.
It reaches everyone in Multnomah County, tenants and owners alike. On a red day no fireplace, wood stove, pellet stove or outdoor fire may be lit in Brooklyn from noon to noon the next day unless the household holds a county exemption, and a yellow day means the county wants you to consider limiting burning. Landlords cannot grant an exemption; the household applies to the county, and renewal is due each September 30. Our wood burning rules guide explains how.
No law requires one, but on a house that old we would get it. A Level 2 inspection is what the standard recommends when a property is sold, and a general inspector does not put a camera down the flue, which on an 1880s Brooklyn stack is where the problems live: missing liner, open thimbles, a furnace connection left behind. The images let you negotiate repairs before closing instead of discovering them with the first fire.
Read our guide on vetting a contractor in Oregon, which shows the state lookup and what to make of the result. Then ask the company two things: is the price posted before the truck leaves, and will you see your own flue on camera. On a Brooklyn house where the chimney predates the Ross Island Bridge, a company that will not show you the inside is asking you to take a lot on faith.
South of Brooklyn the same crew covers Sellwood and Eastmoreland, and north of Powell it covers Richmond and the Hawthorne blocks.
Call with what the fireplace is doing, or text a photo of the opening and one of the chimney top, and we will name the service and its posted price before we come out.