Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in Roswell, GA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for Roswell Homeowners

Roswell marks the northern limit of our thirty miles, and it holds two quite separate categories of work. The historic district around Canton Street and Bulloch Hall contains antebellum homes with original masonry that needs genuinely specialist handling — lime mortar, hand-laid brick, and flues that have been altered several times over a century and a half. Then there is the large 1980s and 1990s housing stock through Martin's Landing and Horseshoe Bend, much of it near the Chattahoochee, where the damp river air adds a slow, persistent moisture load that masonry a mile inland does not deal with.

Antebellum lime-mortar masonry in the historic district; 1980s-1990s river-adjacent housing carrying a persistent moisture load.

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.