Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in Marietta, GA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for Marietta Homeowners

Marietta covers more chimney history than anywhere else we serve. Around the Square and Whitlock Avenue there are genuinely antebellum and Victorian homes with hand-laid brick flues and lime mortar that predates Portland cement, and they need to be treated accordingly — a hard modern mortar mix on that brick will destroy it. Push east into the 1980s and 1990s East Cobb subdivisions and the picture changes completely: prefabricated fireplaces, framed chases, metal chase covers. The two jobs share a name and almost nothing else, and the mistake is applying one approach to the other.

Antebellum and Victorian lime-mortar brickwork near the Square; 1980s-1990s prefabricated systems in framed chases through East Cobb.

A chimney is the only part of a roof that is deliberately full of holes, and in a climate that delivers as much rain as Atlanta does, the odds catch up with it. Water gets in at four places: a cracked crown, failed flashing where the stack passes through the roof, a missing or damaged cap, and brickwork that has become porous enough to drink. The difficulty is that the stain inside the house rarely appears under the actual entry point — water tracks down the outside of the flue and shows up a storey below. Sealing where the stain is achieves nothing, which is why people end up paying for the same leak three times.