Chimney Repairs · Mansfield & north Notts
Chimney Repairs In Mansfield
When did anyone last look at your chimney?
Repointing, flaunching, flashings and removals on stacks across Mansfield and the pit towns around it
Mansfield was a town of coal fires if anywhere was - the stuff came out of the ground a mile from most front doors - and its skyline still carries the chimneys to prove it. Nearly all of them retired decades ago. That matters, because a working flue kept its stack warm and dry from the inside; a redundant one just stands there, unheated, wicking up rain and letting frost work the mortar year after year. The chimney is the highest, most weather-beaten, least-looked-at brickwork on the house. It fails patiently, and it's usually the loft that finds out first.
Free chimney repairs survey
Leave your details and we'll ring you back to arrange a survey. The visit is free, you're under no obligation once we've been, and a roof that doesn't need work gets called a roof that doesn't need work.
1,000+
Repairs carried out
10 years
Workmanship guarantee, on paper
Free
Surveys, quotes and honest bad news
No upselling
A patch that will hold gets recommended as a patch
Recognise any of these?
The signs homeowners around Mansfield bring to us most often, and the story behind each one. A survey confirms it - but this is usually where it's heading.
Damp on the chimney breast upstairs or in the loft
Water is getting into the stack above the roofline and soaking down through the masonry inside it. The usual doors in are cracked flaunching at the crown or open mortar joints - the flashing at the roof gets blamed far more often than it deserves.
Mortar joints you can rake out with a finger
A century of weather, plus - on many coalfield stacks - sulphates left by decades of coal smoke, which attack the mortar chemically from inside the flue. Once joints go open, water gets a highway into the stack.
The stack looks like it's leaning
Sometimes it genuinely is: long coal use can make one face of a stack decay faster than the other and curl it over, and on this coalfield, old mining settlement has nudged plenty of masonry out of true. Some leans are ancient and stable, some aren't - it needs assessing, not guessing, and it's the one chimney symptom we'd never leave for spring.
Bits of mortar or pot in the gutter below the stack
The flaunching - the mortar crown holding the pots - is breaking up and shedding. The pots are loosening with it. This is the cheapest stage at which a chimney problem will ever offer to be fixed.
How we handle chimney repairs in Mansfield
Repair-first, rebuild-rarely
Most 'dangerous chimneys' turn out to be sound stacks with tired tops. We establish how deep the decay actually runs before anyone starts talking about taking bricks down.
Mortar mixed for the bricks it's joining
The soft reds on the older terraces need a softer, breathable mix; hard modern cement on old brick traps water and pops the faces off. It's the most common bad chimney repair in town and we spend a fair amount of time undoing it.
Proper lead, properly fitted
Flashings dressed and wedged into raked-out joints, not mortar fillets or mastic drawn over the gap. Lead done right outlasts everything around it.
The crown gets equal billing
Flaunching fails more often than flashing but gets quoted for less often, because it's invisible from the ground. Ours gets photographed and included, not discovered later.
Redundant stacks capped, vented or removed
A disused flue needs a cap that keeps rain out while letting the stack breathe - seal it solid and the breast sweats indoors. If you'd rather lose the stack entirely, we take it down cleanly and make the roof good.
Ten year guarantee, in writing
On the workmanship, handed over when the job's complete.
A coal town's chimneys, thirty years after the coal
There's a neat irony in Mansfield being where the nation manages its mining legacy from - the Mining Remediation Authority, the old Coal Authority, has its headquarters on Lichfield Lane at Berry Hill - because the town above ground is one long exhibit of what coal built and what its absence leaves behind. The terraces and colliery rows from Forest Town to Warsop Vale were built around the fireplace: two, sometimes three flues to a stack, one stack shared between neighbours, every brick specified in an age when the fire never went out from September to May. Those flues have now been cold for a generation or two. Cold stacks stay wet, wet mortar frosts apart, and sulphate left behind by half a century of coal smoke keeps quietly eating the joints long after the last fire. None of this makes a chimney a write-off - it makes it a structure that needs ten minutes of attention every few years, which is roughly ten minutes more than most have had since the pits shut.
"Of all the chimneys we're asked to look at across Mansfield, barely a handful each year genuinely need rebuilding - the rest need pointing, flaunching and flashing, at a fraction of the money."
Drawn from the chimney repairs work Roof Repairs Mansfield handles
From first call to finished chimney repairs
You tell us what's happening
A phone call or the form, in your own words. Which room, how long it's been going on, whether weather makes it better or worse. No jargon needed - 'brown ring on the back bedroom ceiling' is a perfectly good brief.
We survey it - outside and in
The roof from ground and ladder, and the roof space from inside, because the underside keeps the honest records. Free, and genuinely without obligation - we survey plenty of roofs that turn out to need nothing.
You get the verdict with the evidence
What's wrong, what caused it, photos to prove it, and what happens if you do nothing - sometimes 'nothing' is fine for years. Take it all to another firm for a second price if you like; the diagnosis travels with you.
The work, done as quoted
Failed material stripped back to sound, replacements matched to what's there, lead where lead belongs. The price is the one on the paper - the only exception is hidden timber problems, and those get shown to you before they get fixed.
Tidy site, photos, guarantee
Debris gone, gutters left clear, photographs of the finished work sent to you - most of it you'd need a drone to check yourself - and the ten year written guarantee in your hand before we're off the drive.
And if nothing's wrong?
Then that's the report: nothing's wrong. It happens more often than you'd think, it costs you nothing, and it's why people round here pass our number on.
Ten years, in writing, before we leave the drive
Every roofer in Nottinghamshire will tell you their work is guaranteed. Ask to see the paper and the conversation often changes. Ours doesn't: work booked through Roof Repairs Mansfield carries a 10 year workmanship guarantee as a physical document, dated, signed and handed over with the completion photos - not a line in an email you'll never find again. Materials sit on top of that with their manufacturers' own cover, which differs product to product, so your paperwork names the cover that actually applies to your job.
A guarantee that long only makes commercial sense if repairs are done in a way that doesn't invite a return visit. Around Mansfield that means respecting what the housing actually is: coverings and fixings from the colliery era that fail as systems, not as single tiles, and mortar that has been quietly powdering since the pits shut. So failed material gets stripped back to something sound before new goes on, mortar gets matched to the age of the brick, and anything we can't make right on the day gets said out loud rather than covered over.
The blunt version: if water we were paid to stop finds its way back through our work inside 10 years, we return and put it right at our own cost. That promise has to be cheap to honour - and it is, because of how the work gets done the first time.
10 yrs
Written workmanship cover
1,000+
Repairs carried out
Insured
Public liability held
Named
Manufacturer cover per job
Whoever quotes you, put these to them
Us included - good firms enjoy these questions and poor ones dodge them, which is rather the point of asking.
Has anyone actually been up?
The two faces of a stack you can't see from the street are routinely the worst two. A rebuild quote written from the pavement is an estimate of your anxiety, not of your chimney.
What's in the mix?
Ask what mortar they'll point with. On pre-war brick the answer should involve lime. 'Sand and cement, strong mix' on a soft old stack is the repair your grandchildren will pay to reverse.
Cap or cowl included?
If the flue is disused, the quote should say how it'll be capped and ventilated. Repointing a stack while leaving it open to swallow rain down the flue is solving the outside and ignoring the inside.
Keep The Chimney Or Take It Down?
For a stack that no longer serves anything, both are legitimate answers. Here's the decision as we'd lay it out on your drive.
| Comparison point | Repair and keep it | Remove it |
|---|---|---|
| Up-front cost | Repoint, reflaunch, cap and flash - typically the cheaper day-one option. | Costs more at the time: careful demolition, roofing-in, making good inside the loft. |
| Cost over 20 years | Needs looking at again eventually - it's still masonry in the weather. | Zero. Removed is maintained forever. |
| The look of the house | Keeps the roofline the street was built with - worth real money on a period terrace. | A missing stack on a chimneyed street is noticeable, and on a shared stack you can only remove your half above the roof anyway. |
| Future use | Keeps a wood burner or open fire possible down the line. | Closes that door - reinstating a stack is nobody's cheap project. |
| Structure | No structural questions asked. | Needs proper support for what remains and, on party stacks, agreement with next door. |
| Planning | Repair needs no permission anywhere on our patch. | Usually permitted development - but not automatically in the district's eleven conservation areas, and never assume in Pleasley Park and Vale, where the Article 4 direction bites. |
The stack you share with next door
Half the chimneys on Mansfield's older streets are party stacks - one structure, two owners, and often two very different opinions on spending money. You can repoint and maintain your own side freely, but anything structural touches the Party Wall Act and needs the neighbours on board. We survey the whole stack, report on it honestly, and give you something in writing that makes the conversation over the fence a factual one instead of an awkward one.
What chimney work costs
The money side of chimney repairs
Rebedding pots and renewing flaunching sits at the affordable end - often a few hundred pounds. Full repoint-and-reflash jobs mostly land in the low four figures, and access is the swing factor: the same stack costs very different money on a bungalow in Forest Town and a three-storey frontage near the town centre. Rebuilds and removals run higher and are always preceded by an honest conversation about whether you actually need one. If scaffold is going up anyway for other roof work, adding the chimney while it's there is the cheapest it will ever be.
Full price guideChimney Repairs: asked and answered
We never use the fireplace. Can't we just ignore the chimney?
It's the one part of the house that punishes that policy. An unused stack has no warm flue drying it out, so it stays wetter than any other brickwork you own, and it decays accordingly - the dampest chimneys we open up are almost always long-retired ones. Ignoring it doesn't freeze the problem, it feeds it. Cap it, vent it and point it, and then you genuinely can ignore it for years.
Rain comes down the flue and I can hear it. Is that doing damage?
Yes, slowly. An open flue funnels rain into the middle of the stack, where it soaks the parging and brickwork and eventually shows up as damp patches on the chimney breast - often with brown tarry staining, which is old coal soot dissolving and bleeding through the plaster. A vented cap or capping cowl stops the rain while keeping air moving, and it's one of the cheapest fixes on this entire website.
Could mining subsidence be why my chimney leans?
It's a fair question in this town, and occasionally the answer is yes - stacks are tall, slender and unforgiving of any movement in the house below, so old settlement shows up there first. More often the lean is the stack's own doing: decades of coal gases decay one face faster than the other and the masonry curls. If we survey it and the evidence points at ground movement rather than the stack itself, we'll say so - and it's worth knowing the Mining Remediation Authority, based here in Mansfield, runs a statutory scheme for subsidence damage claims under the Coal Mining Subsidence Act 1991.
What's the white crust on my chimney bricks?
Efflorescence - salts carried out of the brick by water moving through it, left behind as the water evaporates. On coalfield chimneys it's often joined by sulphate staining from old flue gases. Cosmetically it's harmless; diagnostically it's a flag, because it only appears where masonry is wet through. A crusty stack is a stack that's drinking, and it's telling you where.
Do I need the council's permission for chimney work?
Repairs and repointing, no - nowhere on our patch. Removal is usually permitted development, but check before assuming if you're in one of Mansfield district's eleven conservation areas - Mansfield Woodhouse's old core, Market Warsop and the town-centre areas among them - and doubly so in Pleasley Park and Vale, where the Article 4 direction removes the usual freedoms. Over the borders, it's Ashfield, Newark & Sherwood or Bolsover you ask, not Mansfield - which council covers you isn't as obvious here as people think.
Can you fit a bird guard while you're up there?
Yes, and if you've ever had jackdaws in a flue you'll know why people ask - they can fill a chimney with nesting sticks in a season, and a blocked flue on a working fire is a safety matter, not a nuisance. Guards, cowls and caps are quick additions while access is in place, and we'll fit the type that suits how the flue is used rather than whatever's cheapest in the van.
Related reading: Roof leak repairs ·Storm damage repairs ·Roof replacement
Everywhere we take this work
Chimney Repairs across Mansfield and the coalfield towns around it - out to Warsop and Meden Vale in the north, the Ashfield towns to the west, Shirebrook and Pleasley over the Derbyshire line, and the Sherwood villages from Clipstone to Ollerton.
Word from around the town
What homeowners across the Mansfield patch made of the work, in their own words.
"The back bedroom ceiling had a mark that came and went for two years and I'd stopped even noticing it. When Babet hit it turned into a proper leak overnight. They came out two days later, found a split flashing round the chimney - nowhere near where the stain was - and had it done in a morning. Showed me photos of the fault before and after. The quote and the invoice were the same number, which I'm told is rarer than it should be."
"Ours is one of the old colliery houses and the ridge had been shedding bits of mortar onto the path for months. I expected to be told we needed a new roof - the bloke next door had been quoted for exactly that by someone else. Instead they rebedded the ridge, refixed four tiles and told me the rest of the roof was fine for years yet. Charged a fraction of what I'd braced myself for."
"Water was streaming down the front of the house whenever it rained hard and I assumed the worst about the roof. Turned out the gutter had lost its fall and was tipping everything over the edge in one spot. They reset the brackets, sorted a joint, checked the gully at the bottom and were gone within a couple of hours. Also pointed out a slate that wants watching next year rather than fixing now - appreciated that."
"Bought a 1900s terrace near the town centre and the survey flagged the chimney. Two other firms quoted to take it down entirely. These lads went up, told me the stack itself was sound and it just needed repointing with the right mortar, new flaunching and a cap on the dead flue. Three years on the chimney breast is bone dry. Kept the chimney, saved about two grand."
"The extension roof had ponded for years and every couple of winters someone would patch it and it would come back. They were the first to explain the actual problem - no fall on the deck - and quoted to sort that rather than just laying another layer of felt over it. New rubber roof, water actually runs off it now. You get told the truth, which is worth paying for on its own."
Been a customer?
A short review is the most useful thing you can give a local firm - it tells the next household in Mansfield with a dripping ceiling who they can trust with it.
Start with the free chimney repairs survey
One phone call, one visit, and you'll know exactly where your roof stands - with photos, a written diagnosis and a fixed price if work's needed. The survey costs nothing whether the news is good or bad, and around here the news is good more often than the trade lets on.