Chimney sweep near you
We serve Raleigh Hills and Garden Home, and the calls center on orphaned furnace flues in mid-century brick stacks, which need a camera inspection and often a liner, plus sweeps, firebox repair and rebuilds of brick gone loose above the roof.
Updated
Raleigh Hills and Garden Home are mid-century neighborhoods, with many brick-chimney houses, on rolling ground between Beaverton and the Southwest Hills, with Portland mailing addresses and Washington County rules, a combination that confuses more than one homeowner.
A mid-century house here commonly got a brick fireplace plus a chimney that also vented an oil or gas furnace in the basement or utility room, and where a sealed-combustion furnace replaced it, the new furnace vents through the side wall on its own, leaving the old flue open to the rain with nothing warm going up it.
Many of these chimneys are unreinforced masonry built before anyone detailed a chimney for an earthquake. A few older farmhouses and houses from the Red Electric years survive near the old Raleigh and Garden Home station sites, and the later infill on split lots commonly came with factory-built or gas fireplaces, which is a different inspection.
The chimney stock in Raleigh Hills and Garden Home leans to masonry: a fireplace flue beside a furnace flue, often both in one brick stack, the furnace flue now orphaned wherever the furnace has been upgraded.
An orphaned flue is the quiet failure: cold, oversized for the water heater it may still serve, it condenses flue gases into acid that eats mortar, and rain down the open top finishes the job. The louder failure is the earthquake risk, since a tall unreinforced stack on a mid-century ranch is the first part of the house to go, and bracing reduces that risk without removing it.
The calls from Raleigh Hills and Garden Home start from a mid-century brick stack and what the decades have done to it.
The orphaned furnace flue is the first thing we look for on a Raleigh Hills or Garden Home house, and we look with a Level 2 camera inspection, running the camera down both flues to see whether the tile has flaked, the joints have opened and the water heater, if it is still connected, is venting into a flue far too big for it. The same visit assesses the unbraced brick above the roof.
A furnace flue that still serves a water heater gets a stainless liner sized to that small appliance, so the gases stay warm, rise properly and stop condensing on the brick; a flue that serves nothing gets capped and closed at the bottom. Fireplace flues with cracked tile get their own liner, sized to the firebox.
When a mid-century stack has lost its mortar above the roofline, leans, or has brick you can lift out by hand, repointing is past its usefulness and the top is rebuilt from sound brick down, with reinforcement and a new crown. On some Garden Home houses the better answer is to take the masonry down to the roof and finish the flue in listed metal inside a framed, braced chase.
A tile-lined mid-century fireplace that burns through the wet months gets a yearly sweep plus the Level 1 once-over, a brush that fits the tile, the smoke shelf cleared and the damper worked, and on these two-flue stacks we check the furnace flue with a light at the same time. Photos from inside the flue come before and after.
Decades of fires have opened the joints in a mid-century firebox and eroded the parging in the smoke chamber above it, and a firebox with loose firebrick or a smoke chamber with exposed brick corbels lets heat reach places it should not. We repoint the firebrick with refractory mortar and parge the smoke chamber smooth so smoke turns the corner without turbulence.
Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and Scholls Ferry Road are the two spines through Raleigh Hills and Garden Home, with OR 217 at the Beaverton end and US 26 reached by way of Scholls Ferry Road.
Oleson Road, Garden Home Road, Allen Boulevard and Multnomah Boulevard sort the rest, and the lots roll enough that one side of a house can be a full story lower than the other; tell us which side the chimney is on and whether the driveway is steep. The commercial strip along Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway around the New Seasons is where traffic bunches up at the end of the day.
Raleigh Hills is named for resident Raleigh Robinson, a Raleigh post office opened in April 1892, and Southern Pacific's Red Electric line stopped here from 1914 until 1929.
A Garden Home post office was established in 1882, and the Oregon Electric Railway later built a depot named for the community.
Whitford Middle School takes its name from the old Whitford rail station near Allen Boulevard and Scholls Ferry Road, a name that combined those of two New York investors; the station closed around 1920.
New Seasons Market opened its first store in Raleigh Hills, and a Raleigh Hills branch of the Portland post office opened in 1968, which is why mailing addresses here say Portland.
Residents give directions by the Garden Home Recreation Center, the Garden Home Community Library, Whitford Middle School and the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway shops.
Yes. Both ZIPs are in our coverage, and a Portland mailing address on an unincorporated Washington County house changes nothing about the visit, the posted price or the fact that we do not bill the drive separately when we do the work. Tell us the cross streets, since Oleson Road and Garden Home Road addresses are easier to find by landmark than by the postal city.
The Washington County rule, since the houses sit in unincorporated Washington County and the postal city does not decide it. A county red day, which can be called any day from November 1 to March 1, means the fireplace and any wood stove stay cold unless your household qualifies for an exemption, and pellet stoves are not covered. How each county posts its days is in our wood burning rules guide.
No, because an idle masonry flue does not stay idle; it stays open to the rain and keeps condensing whatever the water heater still sends up it. The camera shows whether the tile is flaking, and then the flue is either lined for the water heater or capped and shut so it stops pulling wet air through the house, and the orphaned chimney guide explains why the flue gets worse after the furnace leaves.
Yes, a tall unreinforced brick chimney is the part of a mid-century house most likely to fail in a quake. The choices are to brace it, shorten it to the roofline and cap it, or replace the upper part with a listed metal flue in a framed and braced chase, and bracing reduces the hazard without removing it. The inspection tells you how the stack is built, and our unreinforced masonry guide walks through the options.
Most of the year we land within the week. From October into December the wait grows, because the first cold nights send the west side to the phone. For a mid-century house here, the sweep and the furnace flue check are easiest to book in August or September, when the roofs are dry and the calendar is open. If smoke came into the room or you smelled something last winter, keep the fireplace cold and say so when you call.
Usually a Level 2 camera inspection, which the chimney trade recommends when a house is sold, with the photos of both flues. On a house this age it looks at the fireplace tile, the damper and firebox, the state of the orphaned furnace flue and whether the stack above the roof is braced. Oregon's stove removal law leaves an open masonry fireplace alone, so nothing has to come out unless an uncertified insert was added later.
Raleigh Hills and Garden Home sit between Beaverton, West Slope and Tigard on the county side and Bridlemile, Hillsdale and Multnomah Village in Southwest Portland, and one crew covers all six.
Call with what the fireplace is doing, or text a photo of the opening and one of the chimney top, and we will name the service and its posted price before we come out.