Chimney and fireplace service in Chicago and the near west suburbs

The Census Bureau's 2020 to 2024 survey dates 38.8 percent of Chicago's housing to 1939 or earlier, about three times the national share, and the near west suburbs are older again: 60.5 percent of Berwyn's homes and 59.3 percent of Oak Park's predate 1940. Much of that is the Bungalow Belt. The Chicago Bungalow Association counts more than 80,000 brick bungalows still standing, built between 1910 and the mid-1930s, one and a half stories over a basement, and together they make up nearly a third of the city's single-family homes.

Then come the two-flats. In Chicago 13.1 percent of homes sit in two-unit buildings and 14.4 percent in three- and four-unit buildings, against 3.4 and 4.3 percent nationally, and Berwyn's two-unit share is 15.1 percent. The Bungalow Association describes the two-flat as a stacked bungalow, and one chimney often serves both floors. Almost nobody here heats with wood, about 0.02 percent of city homes, while 77.5 percent of Chicago homes and 91.3 percent of Berwyn's heat with gas. The old brick stack is usually venting furnaces, boilers and water heaters, frequently for two households at once.

Chicago common brick and the mortar that suits it

Builders kept the smooth face brick for the street front and laid the backs, sides and interiors in Chicago common brick, made from local clay and fired buff, salmon or deep red. Those back and side walls are where most bungalow and two-flat chimneys rise. The last maker of commons shut down in 1981, so a repair that matches the wall uses salvaged commons. National Park Service Preservation Brief 2 says new mortar must be softer and more vapor-permeable than the brick around it, because a mortar harder than the brick pushes the stress into the brick faces and they crack and spall.

So on these stacks we rake joints out by hand, mix a mortar to suit the brick, and swap spalled faces for salvaged commons that blend with the rest of the wall. Bungalow and two-flat tuckpointing typically runs $500 to $2,500, and replacing spalled brick with salvaged commons $1,000 to $3,500.

Permits, Landmark districts and Oak Park's historic districts

Chicago writes its own construction codes instead of adopting the residential code most suburbs use, so we build to current code and check what the city requires for your particular job. Two points are spelled out on the city's own pages. Replacing up to 50 square feet of masonry in kind, on a residential building of four stories or fewer, needs no permit. A larger chimney reconstruction can go through the Express Permit Program, provided the chimney work is described on the permit.

Inside a Chicago Landmark district, the Historic Preservation Division reviews permit applications, and the 50-square-foot exception may not apply. Oak Park has three historic districts, among them the Frank Lloyd Wright-Prairie School district, and removing a chimney there, in full or in part, needs a Certificate of Appropriateness. For either review, we help you prepare the photos and the scope.

What the city's CO rules mean for an old chimney

Illinois law calls for a working carbon monoxide alarm within 15 feet of every room used for sleeping in any home with a fireplace, a fossil-fuel heater or an attached garage. The City of Chicago goes further: an alarm inside any bedroom that contains a fireplace or fuel-burning appliance, and one in the same room as every furnace, boiler and water heater, with owner fines of $500 to $2,000 per day per violation. The same city page tells anyone with a vented fireplace to have the chimney cleaned every year. At the free inspection we look at what feeds into each flue:

• Every flue traced from the basement to the top of the stack and matched to the appliance or unit it serves
• Clay tile checked for cracks, gaps and missing sections, since gas exhaust carries a lot of water vapor into the masonry
• The crown, the cap and the flashing, which take the snow and the roughly 67 to 78 freeze-thaw days a year that NOAA normals imply for Midway and O'Hare
• Photos of each problem and a written price before anyone picks up a trowel