Chimney Repair North Hollywood, CA

Our shop sits at 6330 Camellia Ave, which puts us inside the neighbourhood we repair most. North Hollywood is not one housing stock but three, laid down in distinct waves, and each wave fails differently. The oldest band runs through what is now the NoHo Arts District and the streets south of Magnolia Boulevard: 1920s and early 1930s Craftsman and Spanish Colonial bungalows, built when this was still Lankershim township and the Valley was orchards. Those chimneys were laid in soft lime mortar with clay flue tile, and at a hundred years old they are well past the service life either material was designed for.

The second wave is the post-war explosion between 1946 and 1958, which filled everything north of Victory Boulevard and east toward the Tujunga Wash with small tract houses built fast and sold faster. Their chimneys are thinner, often single-wythe brick with a crown poured only an inch or two thick and no overhang at all. A crown that thin cracks within twenty years as a matter of course, and most of them have never been touched. When we are called to a tract house on a street like Cantara, Arminta or Strathern, a cracked or missing crown is the finding more often than not.

The third wave is the apartment and condo construction from the 1960s onward, concentrated along Lankershim and Chandler. Many of those buildings have metal prefabricated fireplaces rather than masonry, which fail in an entirely different way — a rusted firebox panel or a corroded chase cover rather than mortar loss — and need a different repair and sometimes a full unit replacement rather than masonry work.

North Hollywood also sits roughly ten miles from the epicentre of the January 1994 Northridge earthquake, closer than almost any other neighbourhood we serve. That magnitude 6.7 event cracked flue tile and separated smoke chambers across the entire central Valley, and much of that damage has never been looked at because none of it is visible from the ground. If your NoHo chimney was standing in 1994 and has not had a camera scan since, that is the first thing we would want to look at. Call (818) 536-7759 and we can usually be there the same week.

On the 1920s bungalows south of Magnolia, the common package is a crown rebuild plus tuckpointing of the top three or four courses — the part of the stack that takes the weather. That lands between roughly $900 and $1,600 depending on stack size and whether the brick itself has started to spall. The work is worth doing properly on these houses because the original brick is good material and salvageable; it is the mortar and the crown that have worn out around it.

On the post-war tract houses, the economics are different. Those stacks are small, so a crown re-pour with a proper overhang and bond break is frequently a $400 to $700 job and solves the problem outright for decades. We would rather do that than talk anybody into a rebuild they do not need. Where a tract-house chimney does need more, it is usually because the crown was left cracked for fifteen years and the water has already taken out the brick below it.

A caution specific to this area: North Hollywood has a lot of flipped houses, and a flipped chimney is frequently a painted chimney. Paint and elastomeric coatings trap moisture inside masonry that needs to breathe, so a chimney that looks freshly done can be rotting underneath. When we inspect a recently sold NoHo property we look specifically for paint on brick, tar over flashing, and a crown patched with roofing cement — the three cosmetic fixes that hide real damage.