Does Your Tacoma Chimney Need Tuckpointing? How to Read the Mortar

Age comes first. More than a quarter of the city's homes, close to 27 percent in the latest five-year Census survey, went up no later than 1939. No other city in our service area comes close, and the county as a whole sits near 10 percent. In the North Slope Historic District nearly four in five buildings predate 1930. Those chimneys have been through roughly a century of wet winters.

Weather does the rest. The Tacoma #1 station averages just under 40 inches of precipitation a year and around 32 nights at or below freezing. Water soaks into weakened joints, freezes, expands and pushes the mortar out a little further each time. The top few courses above the roof take the most of it, because they are wet on every side and nothing shelters them.

Binoculars and a dry day are enough for a first look. The table ranks what you might see by how soon it needs attention.

Fresh joints fix a chimney whose bricks are sound. When many bricks have spalled, when the crown has cracked through, or when the upper courses have shifted, repointing alone leaves the real problem in place and a partial rebuild of the top section may be the better investment.

Seismic history matters in that decision. When state emergency planners modeled a shallow 7.1 rupture under the city, they flagged brick and stone built without steel reinforcement as liable to come down in part or entirely. The 2001 Nisqually shaking, for its part, left one inspected home in three with a damaged chimney. A structural crack therefore deserves a proper assessment, not a cosmetic patch.

Chimneys that have lost their top courses and were capped off lower than before raise one more point. Washington's residential code wants a masonry chimney to rise 3 feet or more past the spot where it exits the roof, and to top anything within 10 feet by 2 feet. A rebuild is the moment to restore that height, because a stack cut short tends to draft poorly and sends smoke back toward the house.

Tacoma has nine historic districts, four of them on the local Tacoma Register; the Wedge, which the City describes as a pre-war middle-class neighborhood, is one of the four. On a contributing house in one of those four, the City warns that altering the exterior can trigger a design review, and its list of features includes chimneys alongside porches, siding and windows. The review applies when the work needs a permit, and it is handled by the Landmarks commission.

In practice that favors matching the original brick, joint profile and mortar color. Raise it with the City before you commit to a schedule, and ask your contractor whether they have worked under design review before.

Our masonry repair is priced from $425 to $3,200; a crown or a few joints sit at the low end, repointing a full stack toward the top. Published figures elsewhere give a sense of the market. Homeyou's Tacoma estimate for crown damage repair is $150 to $300, and its Tacoma range for a complete repair or rebuild is $1,000 to $3,000. Nationally, Fixr lists chimney tuckpointing at $500 to $2,500, and HomeAdvisor prices brick repointing at $4 to $25 per square foot. None of those numbers is ours; they come from the publishers named. Our own inspection is billed at $99 plus tax and deducted from the total when the written quote gets your approval.