Where we work

Soft-brick spalling made worse by the wrong repair. These 1890s–1910s houses were laid up in soft brick and lime mortar; when someone repoints them with modern hard Portland mortar, the mortar becomes stronger than the brick and the brick face blows out instead of the joint. We match the mortar to the masonry, which on Strawberry Hill usually means a lime-rich mix.

Multiple unlined flues sharing one stack. A 19th-century Leavenworth chimney often carries three or four separate flues, some abandoned, and the masonry partition between them — the withe — erodes over 150 years. Once it does, smoke from one fireplace crosses into another flue and comes out of a fireplace on a different floor. It presents as a draft complaint; it is actually a containment failure.

Crowns failing en masse. A mortar-wash crown — which is what most of these got originally rather than a proper poured cap with an overhang — has a service life of roughly fifty to seventy years in this climate. The whole city passed that mark at once, so cracked crowns letting water into the top of the flue is far and away the most common thing we find here.

Multi-flue stacks with mismatched ages of failure. On a wide four- or five-flue chimney the flues do not deteriorate at the same rate — the great room flue sees heavy seasonal use while the appliance flues run cool and condense. Homeowners get one flue swept, assume the stack is fine, and the problem is in a flue nobody looked at. These stacks also need a single fabricated lid rather than individual caps.

Galvanised chase covers rusting through. Builders used galvanised steel as standard on prefab chases through the 1980s and 1990s, and it corrodes from the underside first, where flue condensate collects — so it is failing long before anything shows from the ground. By the time you can see rust streaks running down the siding, water has usually been getting into the chase framing for at least a season.

Cracked refractory panels in factory-built fireboxes. Prefab units have moulded refractory panels rather than firebrick, and once a panel cracks wider than the thickness of a dime the manufacturer considers the unit unsafe to burn. This is the most common finding on an Olathe inspection, and it is the one homeowners are most surprised by — the fireplace looks perfectly fine.

Termination clearance and blocked direct vents. On a house this new the masonry is not the problem — the venting is. Direct-vent terminations get buried by later landscaping, blocked by a deck the owner added, snow-drifted, or nested in. A blocked termination on a sealed unit means the appliance either locks out or, worse, spills. Nothing about it is visible from indoors.

Chase flashing failure where the chase meets a complex roofline. Lenexa-era builders put a lot of gables, dormers and roof intersections around the chase, and every one of those is another place for water to get behind the flashing. On these houses the leak is far more often at the chase-to-roof junction than at the cover on top.

Wrong diagnosis from the ground. Because Shawnee has both systems side by side, the single most common problem is a homeowner told they need masonry repair on what is actually a framed chase with a brick veneer skirt — or the reverse. Brick on the outside does not mean masonry on the inside, and the repair is completely different.