Chimney - BIG project

After a chimney fire in December, the chimney had suffered some major cracking and damage from all the intense heat. It was unusable until either it was cored out and relined, or completely removed and rebuilt. I went with the latter. It took 4 men working non-stop to get all the brick torn out and removed. We went from the attic to the basement and removed about 40 feet of brick, estimated to weigh about 5000 pounds or so. The new chimney will go back in the same location, only now it will be a 9" insulated metal pipe, weighing about 250 pounds.

Here is how it started, up in the attic. Bracing was installed to support the 3' section of brick up on the roof. I wanted to maintain the original appearance from outside the house. A shiny round metal pipe sticking out of the roof just wasn't gonna cut it. I estimate the brick on the roof to be around 300lbs, so not a whole lot of weight really. It is braced with 2x8's and there will also be 2x4 bracing running down to the joists below. I calculated wind loads up to 100mph and they were relatively insignificant because there isn't much surface area sticking up above the roof. I will install some angle iron in each corner as an extra precaution, (we had a tornado in the area last year that severely damaged several houses a couple miles away).

Glen throwing down the grunt labor, ready to tackle some more buckets of brick.

Matt working near the ceiling on the 2nd floor.

Looking down from the second floor. Remus is starting to pull bricks going through the floor into the basement.

Here's what was installed to help control the dust on the 1st floor. It seemed to work pretty good. Kinda reminded me in the movie ET when they quarantined of their house...

Nice little pile of bricks. This isn't all of them either.

On a side note, I recieved an awesome package from my Aunt Carol (mismike), she sent some cool things to hang on our walls, including 2 very large ornate wooden keys. Thanks Aunt C! I'll get some pictures when I figure out where I'm gonna hang them.