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Brick
for the chimney. You may be thinking, "what else you
moron?". Well it seems every
new "custom house" springing up has those faux chimneys that
they cover with the vinyl siding... yeah, that's real attractive
(man, I'm sorry for all those I'm insulting out there... I really am a
nice guy, just a little opinioned).
Our
addition required our existing chimney to be extended up to meet the new
roof height. The other factor we had was our old chimney was about 6 feet
wide... but it only had one flue up it. I guess the original builder had
some extra bricks he waned to use. The thing was also a crumbly mess and
badly in need of repair anyway. The size wouldn't have been in issue
except for the fact that this monster was robbing some prime real estate
as it traveled through our new bedroom. We decided to knock down the old
chimney as far down as possible and then jog it over to one side and exit
the roof as a smaller square profile. Once the mason started getting into
it he realized it could not be jogged over low enough to regain all the
space we wanted in the bedroom. We wound up with a sort of weird boxed out
space in the bedroom with a built in bench (see photo below)
 The
mason knocked down the old chimney and apparently in negotiations we
didn't discuss who got rid of the old debris... enter me. To be honest, he
gave me an excellent price and did great work so I didn't mind lugging the
old rubble over to a window that happened to have the roll off dumpster
below it. Believe me, if I had to carry this all down through the house I
would have put up more of a fight.
The
old chimney was rebuilt up to the roof line with cinder block. The framers
had put an opening in the roof according to plan and happily the mason was
able to bring the chimney over to meet that opening perfectly.  Once
this was complete the work moved outside and the brick laying began. In an
ideal world I would recommend getting your chimney up before your roof
goes on. Lugging heavy materials across hot, soft shingles is a recipe for
damage. Luckily, we had no real damage. We were fortunate in still having
our framers Lull on site and the mason (also a friend of the framer) used
it to lift everything up the the chimney opening so foot traffic across
the roof was reduced to a minimum. We used a brick that looks pre-worn and
we think has a nice older look to compliment the fact that the original
house is  by
no means new. The whole job took a little over a day. The roofer came back
after and flashed the chimney with copper to finish off both jobs (the
roof and chimney).
 
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