Peotone home purchase: why the buyer needed a Level 2 chimney inspection, not a flashlight look

By Jacob Dove, Friendship Chimney Sweep

What the home inspection said, and what it could not see

The house sits on one of the older blocks near the Peotone village core, a two-story with an interior brick chimney serving a wood-burning fireplace on the first floor and a furnace flue alongside it. The buyers had a general home inspection, and the report did what those reports usually do with a chimney: the inspector looked up the firebox with a light, noted some soot, checked that the damper opened, and wrote that the fireplace appeared functional but should be evaluated by a chimney specialist. That last line is the important one, and the buyers were right to act on it before closing.

A general home inspector is covering the whole house in a few hours. Looking up a flue from the firebox shows the first few feet at best. Everything above the smoke chamber, where most flue damage lives, is out of view. That is not a criticism of home inspectors; it is simply a different job.

What a Level 2 inspection found

The NFPA 211 standard, which we work to, describes three levels of chimney inspection. Level 1 is the routine yearly check of readily accessible parts. Level 2 adds a video camera run through the full length of the flue, a look at accessible areas in the attic and crawl spaces, and checks of clearances to wood framing. The standard calls for a Level 2 when a property is sold or transferred, because the new owner has no history of how the chimney was used or maintained.

On this job our camera showed a vertical crack running through two flue tiles about ten feet up, the kind of crack that often comes from a past chimney fire or years of thermal stress. At the smoke chamber, the mortar parging had fallen away and left a gap between masonry units. In the attic, the chimney passed through the floor framing with the proper air space on three sides but with a board touching the brick on the fourth [Observed]. None of this was visible from the firebox, and none of it was an emergency with the fireplace unused, but all of it mattered before anyone lit a fire.

Peotone has a mix of older homes in the village and newer houses on the edges surrounded by open prairie and farm fields. The older chimneys have often been through several owners and a few different heating setups, and the open land means strong, steady winds that put extra water on the chimney top every storm. A home sale is the one moment when a buyer can find all of that out before it becomes their repair.

How the buyers used the report

We gave the buyers a written report with the camera stills, a plain description of each issue, and the repairs needed to make the fireplace safe: a stainless liner listed to UL 1777 for the damaged flue, smoke chamber parging, and correcting the framing contact in the attic. They took that report back to the sellers and negotiated the repair into the sale. After closing we did the work, then ran the camera again so they had a clean baseline for future yearly inspections.

Jacob Dove, our founder and team leader with 29 years in the trade, puts it simply: if the house has a chimney, schedule the chimney inspection inside your inspection window, not after the keys change hands. We are Insured & Bonded, and inspection pricing is published on our pricing page. We answer the phone 7 days a week from 7am to 9pm at (815) 449-4264, and we can usually fit a sale inspection inside a tight contract deadline.

If this sounds like your house: we handle chimney inspection across Kankakee County, and our Peotone page covers what we usually find there. Call (815) 449-4264, 7am to 9pm, any day.

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