New Pitsligo · Aberdeenshire
Chimney Repairs in North Aberdeenshire
The chimney is the most exposed thing on your house and the first to go. On the Banff and Buchan coast, stacks take weather from every side with nothing to shelter them.
What goes wrong with a stack
- Flaunching — the mortar cap the pots sit in — cracks and lets water into the stack
- Pointing washes out, so the stack takes on water and the damp shows on the chimney breast
- Cement fillets round the base crack away from the slate
- Lead soakers and aprons split or were never fitted in the first place
- Frost gets into a saturated stack and spalls the faces off the stone
Damp on a bedroom chimney breast is nearly always the stack rather than the room. It works down from the top.
Lime mortar on older stone stacks
This matters more than anything else on this page. A lot of the older houses around New Pitsligo, Strichen and the Banff coast are granite or rubble stone built with lime mortar. If you repoint a stack like that in hard cement, you seal the joints, and the moisture that used to escape through the mortar has to go out through the stone instead. The face of the stone then blows off in the next hard frost. We repoint in lime on lime-built stacks, and in cement only where the stack was built in cement — brick stacks on later housing, generally.
Repair or rebuild
If the stack is sound below the roof line and only the top few courses have gone, we take it down to good work and rebuild from there, reusing the original stone or brick where it is worth keeping. If it is loose all the way down, or leaning, it comes down properly and goes back up on new lead. Either way it gets fresh flaunching and the pots re-set.
Disused flues
If a flue is not in use, capping it solid is the common mistake. The stack still needs to breathe or moisture is trapped inside it. We fit a ventilated cowl, which keeps rain out and lets air move, and vent the fireplace below if it has been blocked up.
New lead soakers and stepped flashings go on as part of every stack repair. We do not put a cement fillet back — it will only crack again.
Questions about chimney repairs
Do I need scaffolding for chimney work?
For anything more than a quick look, yes. A stack cannot be worked on safely off a ladder, and the quote will say whether scaffold or a tower is included.
Can you remove a chimney I do not use?
We can take a stack down to roof level and slate over it. Think it through first — it changes how the house looks and you lose the flue permanently.
Why is damp showing on my chimney breast but not the ceiling?
Because the water is coming down inside the stack rather than through the roof. That points at the flaunching, the pointing or missing soakers.
Damp on the chimney breast?
It almost always starts at the top of the stack. We will get up and look, and price the repointing, flaunching and lead properly.