What a Lake Erie winter does to a Lakewood chimney
A chimney is the most exposed masonry on the whole house. It stands above the roofline with no shelter, soaking up rain and snow on every side, and in Lakewood it does that a stone's throw from the lake, where the winters are long and the snow keeps coming. The damage that does is slow and almost entirely invisible from the ground, which is why so many homeowners are caught off guard by it. Brick and mortar are porous, so they drink in water all season, and when that trapped water freezes it expands and pushes the masonry apart from the inside. Repeat that freeze and thaw a few hundred times across a single Cleveland winter and you get the spalled brick faces, the crumbling mortar joints, and the cracked crowns we find on chimneys all over the west side.
The flue inside takes its own kind of punishment. When you burn wood in a fireplace, the smoke carries unburned tar and soot up the flue, and on the cold inner wall of a chimney that runs up the outside of a Lakewood house, that residue condenses and hardens into creosote. The colder the flue, the faster it builds, and an exterior chimney on a lake-effect winter night is about as cold as a flue gets. Creosote is not just dirt. It is fuel, and a thick enough layer is what turns a normal fire into a chimney fire. The same cold also feeds drafting trouble in the tight, well-sealed older houses around here, where a fireplace that drew fine for decades suddenly spills smoke into the room. None of this announces itself. It builds quietly through the burning season and shows up as a leak, a smoky room, or a failed inspection, which is the whole case for a look before you light the first fire.