Chimney Leak Repair in the Seattle Area, WA.

A chimney is the one place where a masonry structure punches through the roof, which makes it the single most likely entry point for water on a Pacific Northwest home. What makes it hard is that five quite different failures produce the same symptom – a stain on a ceiling, a damp patch on a wall, a smell after rain – and no two of them are fixed the same way.

Water gets in at the crown when the concrete slab on top cracks and lets rain into the brickwork. It gets in at the flashing where the stack meets the roof, which is the most common of all. It gets in through the face of the chimney itself when the mortar joints have opened or the brick has spalled, because a single wythe of brick above the roofline is exposed on all four sides and has nothing behind it. It gets in down the flue when there is no cap. And it can arrive from somewhere else entirely, run along a rafter and appear at the chimney, which is how a roofing problem gets billed as a chimney problem.

So the work is diagnosis first. We test where the water is actually entering – from the roof, from the attic side, under water where access allows – and then correct that, rather than sealing the most visible suspect and hoping. The honest version of this service is that about half the chimneys we are called to for a leak need one specific thing fixed, and the other half have been leaking long enough that the masonry itself now needs work.