I’m a little nervous about this project, so I’m going to ask some stupid questions to be sure I’m not overlooking something.
Frame house, 110 years old, full basement, two floors of living space and 12′ tall attic. Chimney goes right up through the middle of the house. It’s about 2′ x 2′. Origonally served wood stoves on each floor and later boiler and hot water heater in the basement. Converted over the heat to direct vent forced air a few years ago, and now we plan to change the water heater to a power assisted side vent model. Now there should be no need for the chimney, right? (Stupid ? #1) There’s no fireplaces, and the only other fuel burning appliances are the dryer and stoves.
Next. we’re going to have a roofer disassemble the chimney where it penetrates the roof and patch the hole. If I continue to take apart the chimney down to the basement, is there any thing else to be concerned about, such as compromisng the structure of the house? It’s a pretty simple house, 22′ wide, 45′ deep, gables on the short ends, balloon framed, bearing wall in the middle of the house running the long way.
I wish I could take pictures but I can’t get them to work on my computer. This is probably not enought information without seeing the whole thing, but any thoughts or concerns would be appreciated.
Replies
Rich,
There are several threads on this topic in the archives. But no unless it has become structural over time unintentionally.
WSJ
Thanks, I looked in the archives, pretty muched answered my questions and some got tips too.
Rich,
Having done the exact same project, (tearing out a ~35' chimney in my house)...trust me, it's an easy job.
Post back it you run into difficulties.
WSJ
Where is the problem at when trying to post the pics?
Is the difficulty in getting the pics to the puter in the first place?
I think I need to find a book like "Posting pictures for dummys". I was trying to put photos in a scanner and download them. The whole process alludes me. Can't get them to download into a file I want. Then if i do i can't figure out how to post them. I'll have to get my 12 year old neice to show me how to do it.
been there.
What scanner program are you using?
be I went and broke down. Bought a digital camera.
"I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days."
In a few cases the beams are actually set into the chimney, but that's usually only on older homes (1700s) with more massive chimneys.
I helped my (now X) BIL take down his chimney in an almost identical situation. Same size house, same age, same size chimney. He had the roofer take down the chimney to below roof level just as you will, then we took it down from there. It took the two of us a Saturday to do it.
After that much time, most of the mortar is pretty punk, so it comes apart easily (at least in our case). We knocked the loose mortar into the hole (make sure the thimbles below are well-plugged or they'll spray dust into the rooms), then put the bricks into 5-gallon buckets and hauled them out. It was winter, so we use a sled to haul the bricks from the house to back by the garage where we dumped them.
When we got into the finished space, we found we could pry the plaster off in fairly large pieces.
Was really pretty easy. We expected to just maybe get down to the floor of the second story (he would have been happy to stop there), but ended up going all the way down to about the last 4 feet in the basement (which I left for him to do later). It's amazing how much space this freed up in the house.
Have some plywood on hand to patch holes in the floor. Understand that you'll have to patch the walls where the chimney has been removed, and also redo the floor in those areas. If you get to a place where you discover that yes, indeed, the structure is resting on the chimney then just stop. You can cap it off there if you don't find a way to fix the situation.
Edited 5/28/2005 2:29 pm ET by DanH
done about 3 of these i was lucky to have enough space to let gravity take the bricks down. over the edge of the roof or out windows anything to save carrying them dan