Say you’re up on the roof, since you have a bunch of scaffolding laying around why not, and you need to take care of a couple leaks, one minor, one nasty around the old vent (a story in itself). Say you notice the chimney mortar needs to be repointed. (The cement around the bricks needs a re-do.) What would happen when you’re doing this, and you discover the previous owner didn’t hire the best of workers to fix it previously?
On, just http://www.atypicalife.net/blog/archives/P8030101.html','popup','width=415,height=521,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false">something like this.
That whole section was held together with sand. Not crumbling mortar, but sand, just resting there. Ron figures it was a really, really bad batch of mortar. I take it for granted that he knows so much about how a house is supposed to be built. I can’t imagine how oblivious the previous owner was about a lot of simple house-related things.
sounds….uuummmmm…..interesting and not in a good way. hope you can fix it. good luck.
That is too bad. Most mortar is made with some percentage of sand. Incidently, so is tile grout, perhaps the previous owner had some tile grout laying around and decided to use it instead. Who knows. It is better to start from scratch if all of the bricks are loose anyway. That way you ensure a proper and safe repair. There could be other problems lurking that may need to be addressed.
Oh, there are tons of problems with the chimney. They even mortarted the liner in spots. The good part is, we don’t use the chimney at all. There was only one section of the mortar like this, so my husband thinks it was a bad batch. The surrounding pricks are in there good. He’s done brickwork before.
We’re weighing the cost of fixing the chimney (it would need a new liner all the way down) versus the cost of removing it, iwth the work done by ourselves as much as possible. The house is over 100 years old, so there’s a lot to think about.