Chimneys have existed on homes for centuries, a place where the smoke from the fireplace will escape the building. And as long as there has been a chimney, there has been a fireplace service or a chimney cleaning service. Old photographs from the early 1900s show a classic image of young, soot-covered chimney sweep boys, and while no contractor today is a child, this line of work still exists, and modern cleaning materials and tools can be used to keep a chimney clean, or else unclog it of debris or repair it, or even get one installed to begin with. Fireplaces are today less often used for cooking or drying wet laundry and more often used as a comfortable accessory for the living room, providing light, warmth, and sounds. Some homes have a false and electric fireplace, while others have the real thing. Some are in fact a gas fireplace, and an owner can hire a gas fireplace service in their hometown or city.
Chimneys Today
Many homes in the United States today have a chimney in them, often more in certain parts of the nation than others. Houses built in the Mountain states, for example, have chimneys at a 38% rate, and 74% of homes in the New England region such as in Vermont or Massachusetts will have them. Today, homes have chimneys more often than ever; the national Association for Home Builders, for one, revealed that 60% of new houses have at least one fireplace in them, compared to 36% of houses built in the early 1970s. Most often, these fireplaces will be either masonry fireplaces, or factory-built, prefabricated fireplaces. Masonry fireplaces, in particular, are big. Constructed out of bricks, blocks of stone and mortar, they are huge structures that often weigh six or seven tons, and they will probably appear more often in larger homes for this reason. How can someone keep these fireplaces and chimneys taken care of?
Calling a Fireplace Service
Someone whose fireplace gets coated with a lot of remains or is damaged may need to call a fireplace service to get it repaired or cleaned out, and chimney repair may be needed for an old home or if flying debris, such as from a tornado or hurricane, damages it. A person living in Virginia, for example, might search online for “chimney repair Northern Virginia” or “chimney cleaning Washington DC” to find local services.
Attempting to clean a chimney on one’s own may be dirty and dangerous work, but hiring crews to take care of this can get a chimney or fireplace back into working order. If someone buys an old home, for example, the chimney may be clogged or dirty or the fireplace may be dirty as well, and if the homeowner wants to use them, they can call upon a fireplace service crew to clean it out professionally. This allows any household to enjoy their fireplace and not suffer from a lot of ashy dirt or smelly products, and no one would want to start a fire in the fireplace, only to get the living room filled with smoke because the chimney is clogged. The buyer of an old home may also find out that their masonry fireplace is worn out or damaged from decades of use, so crews can be hired to fix it, and make a masonry fireplace look like new.
Some home buyers will commission a custom home builder crew to construct a house of their own design, and interested customers can hire a fireplace service and chimney crews to get such a thing installed, and those getting a custom home built may indulge in building a large, classy-looking masonry fireplace for aesthetic reasons. Every once in a while, when needed, the homeowner can call upon a fireplace crew or chimney cleaners to get it cleared out after repeated use. A homeowner will certainly need to hire chimney repair crews or other contractors if their chimney is damaged in strong winds that carry debris during a storm, and homeowners can also have a cap placed over the chimney like an open roof. The platform is raised enough to allow smoke to easily come out, but falling items such as rain, hail, or anything else cannot get down into the chimney.
