Chimney Refurbishment

We had noticed from the ground that the chimney stack on the old part of the house was starting to crumble around the capping.  It is made of dressed cotswold stone and the frost has been allowed to get into the stone and start to shatter it.

Last week scaffolding was erected and a local roofing company have rebuilt the top section.  Three new chimney pots have been installed to replace the rather crude slate cappings that were there before :

The new pots are for flues that we do not use, so ventilated "button caps" have been silicon sealed into the pots.  These can be easily removed if the flue is brought into use in the future.

Apparently the root cause of the weathering we had experienced was failure of the original concrete flaunching because it had the wrong mix.  This is now the right mix, though I still don't know what the difference is.

While the scaffold was up, we took the opportunity to inspect some of the surrounding roof.  It is not a pretty picture.  A large number of tiles are starting to crumble away and break up.  Here are a couple of examples :

 

We discussed this with the roofers, who told us that this might be an example of a bad batch of tiles manufactured by Bradstone 20 or 30 years ago.  Apparently that have compensated other householders in the past, and it is worth an enquiry.  That has gone on my "ToDo" list as the cost of re-roofing the old part of the house is not going to be small, and any help we can get with that is welcome.