Chimney Tuckpointing and Rebuilds in Evansville

Chimney tuckpointing in Evansville runs $800 to $2,500, a cast concrete crown with a drip edge $400 to $1,200, a rebuild from the roofline $2,500 to $7,000, and a full rebuild from the firebox $8,000 to $20,000. The chimney is the first masonry on an Evansville house to fail and the one most likely to be over-sold, so this page is mostly about telling repoint from rebuild from the ground. Send a photo of the stack and the crown and you get a straight answer.

Why the chimney goes first

A chimney is the worst-case brick on the house. It is exposed on four sides. It is wet from the outside by rain and from the inside by flue gases condensing on cold brick every time the furnace or fireplace runs. It stands above the roofline in the wind, so the south face dries and the north face does not. And the top of it is usually sealed with a thin mortar wash that cracks in a couple of seasons and then funnels water straight down into the core.

Then the weather does its work. NOAA’s 1991-2020 normals for Evansville Regional Airport count 92.6 nights a year with a low at or below 32 degrees and only 15.5 days that stay frozen, so the chimney freezes and thaws roughly 77 times a winter, with January alone averaging 23.6 freezing nights. Water in the joints and in the brick expands each time. The joints go first, then the brick faces spall, then the top courses loosen, and then the stack starts to lean. A chimney on an 1890s house in Riverside or Bayard Park that was repointed in hard Portland mortar in the 1980s will usually show the whole sequence at once: intact grey joints and spalled brick between them.

Reading your chimney from the ground

• Mortar missing from joints, brick faces intact: repoint, new crown, cap, flashing check. $1,200 to $3,700 all in.
• Scattered spalled brick, fewer than a third of the units above the roof: repoint plus replace the spalled units, new crown. Add $20 to $40 per brick.
• A third or more of the brick spalled, or the top courses loose, or the stack visibly out of plumb: rebuild from the roofline. $2,500 to $7,000.
• Cracked or separated brick at the roofline or below, water inside the house at the chimney, or a leaning stack from the base: full assessment; a rebuild from the firebox is possible at $8,000 to $20,000, but it is rare and we will not sell it from a photo.
• White staining down the face: efflorescence, meaning water is moving through the brick. Usually the crown.
• Rust streaks on the brick below the cap: the cap or a steel flue component. Cheap to fix now.

What a proper chimney repoint includes

1. Crown inspection. Nine times out of ten the crown is the cause. A cracked mortar wash gets removed and replaced with a cast concrete crown at least two inches thick at the edge, sloped away from the flue, with a drip edge overhanging the brick by at least an inch and a bond break around the liner so the crown can move without cracking.
2. Grind and repoint. Joints above the roofline ground or hand-raked to at least 3/4 inch (the National Park Service standard is 2 to 2.5 times the joint width), cleaned, dampened, packed in lifts, and tooled to match. Lime-based mortar on pre-1930 chimneys, Type N on mid-century, Type S on modern block-core stacks. The same process as tuckpointing on the walls, just with more scaffolding.
3. Counter-flashing. Step flashing tucked into a reglet cut into the mortar joints, not caulked to the brick face. Caulk-on-brick flashing is why so many Evansville chimneys leak at the roofline.
4. Cap. A stainless or galvanized cap with a spark screen keeps rain and animals out of the flue and reduces the condensation load on the brick.
5. Cure. Misted in heat, protected from freezing, never placed with the brick below 40 degrees and falling.

What a rebuild from the roofline includes

The stack comes down to the roofline, or to the first sound course below it. Salvaged brick that is sound gets cleaned and reused where the wall is historic; spalled units are replaced with matched brick. The stack goes back up in matched mortar with the same corbeling and cap detail, a new clay or stainless liner if the old one is cracked, a cast crown with a drip edge, new counter-flashing, and a cap. On a Riverside or Lincolnshire house the reproduction of the original profile is the point, and it is what a Certificate of Appropriateness review will look at.

Housing stock and what it means for your chimney

• Riverside, Washington Avenue, Culver, Bayard Park, Goosetown, Lamasco (1850s to 1920s): tall corbeled chimneys in soft brick and lime mortar, often with limestone caps. Repoint in lime, replace spalled units from salvage, rebuild the corbels to match.
• Lincolnshire and the 1920s to 1950s East Side: Tudor and Colonial Revival chimneys, harder brick, sometimes decorative pots. Type N mortar; the crowns are frequently the original mortar wash and long gone.
• Post-war ranches and Newburgh’s 1960s to 1970s growth: block-core chimneys with a brick veneer, Type S mortar, and the common failure is a cracked crown and rust from a steel damper or liner.

Pricing

Height above the roof, roof pitch (a steep slate roof in Riverside means scaffolding, not a ladder), mortar type, and how many units are spalled drive the number. The pricing page has the full table. Two things we will say every time: replace the crown while the scaffold is up, and do not let anyone repoint a chimney that needs rebuilding.

Permits, review, and licensing

A like-for-like repoint needs no building permit. A rebuild above the roofline may, depending on the jurisdiction, and anything structural around the firebox does; where a permit is needed the fee passes through at cost. Evansville and Vanderburgh County license masons through the Building Commission, with a $25,000 bond and $300,000 in liability insurance behind the brick and masonry contractor license. Henderson, Kentucky requires a city specialty contractor license that names masonry. In the Riverside Preservation Area, a chimney rebuild is a conspicuous change to the exterior of a historic building and goes to the Historic Preservation Commission; matched repointing is generally ordinary maintenance under city code but confirm with the Historic Preservation Officer. Repairs arranged through this site are performed by licensed, insured local masonry contractors.

Timing

April through November for mortar; NWS Paducah puts the average last freeze at April 6 and the first at October 29. A loose stack in December gets a temporary cover and a spring rebuild. If the crown is cracked in September, replace it before the freeze-thaw season starts, because that is the cheapest chimney repair you will ever buy.

Crews handle chimneys across Evansville and out to Newburgh, Henderson, Boonville, Mount Vernon, Princeton, and Haubstadt. Send a photo of the whole stack from the ground, a zoom on the top courses and crown, and a shot of the roofline flashing, and you get repoint or rebuild, and the number, usually the same day.