Fauntleroy, King County
Creosote is unburned wood tar that condensed on a flue wall instead of leaving the chimney. It comes in three forms, and a brush only defeats the first. Removal in Fauntleroy starts at $245 for deposits that are crunchy but still brushable. Hard, glassy glaze costs more, since it must be softened chemically or ground off with rotary tools over a longer visit, sometimes two. We tell you which form you have after looking, not over the phone.
Typical investment
From $245
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Book your $99 inspection
$99 plus tax, deducted when you approve the repair
Not sure where to start
Pick what you're seeing at your Fauntleroy home — we'll point you to the right fix.
What we do
The same crew, the same written quote — for Fauntleroy homes.
Level 1 examination of everything reachable, with a Level 2 camera pass when the reachable parts leave a question open
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Full-height brushing of the flue with a head sized to its shape and material
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Assessment of the stack from roofline to crown, with a photo of each defect
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Camera survey and measurement of the existing flue before anything is ordered
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Measurement of each flue tile, or of the whole crown for a multi-flue cap
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Burner, pilot assembly and firebox cleaned; logs or media put back in the layout the manual shows
Learn moreRanges shown for orientation — the exact figure is written up on-site, after the inspection.
Old-growth fir once went up Fauntleroy chimneys as cordwood. The Southwest Seattle Historical Society preserves an account of a tree some nine feet thick, felled beside the lane to the school and cut for firewood. Today wood is a minor fuel: among the 7,921 occupied homes of the surrounding Census ZIP code area, the estimate of households heating mainly with wood is tiny and less certain than its own margin of error. Fireplaces here are mostly for pleasure, and a pleasure fire is often a short one, started in a cold flue and left to die down early.
Seattle winters are cool, gray and long more than they are harsh. WeatherSpark's city profile sets the cool season at 3.6 months, from November 12 to March 1, and rates January the cloudiest month, its sky gray roughly 71 days in every hundred. Fauntleroy adds exposure: Wikipedia situates it on a cove in Seattle's southwest corner, looking west across the Sound, on the side of the peninsula that takes the wind.
A chimney built on an outside wall facing that weather starts every fire cold, and stays cooler along its length than one rising through the middle of a house. Cool flue walls are where tar condenses. We cannot change which wall your chimney is on. We can tell you, from the pattern of the deposit on camera, whether it is forming near the top, where the flue is coldest, and what burning habit or liner change would slow it down.
Every creosote removal we do in Fauntleroy includes:
Smoke coming back into the room, or a smell that won't go? Book the inspection first.
Book nowThat habit is how glaze forms. Smoke from a slow or short fire is cool and heavy with vapor. It meets a flue wall that never warmed up, and it condenses there as a sticky film. The next fire bakes that film hard and adds another. Green wood makes it worse, and besides, the Clean Air Agency permits nothing wetter than seasoned cordwood, manufactured logs being the alternative. A stove insert connected to an oversized masonry flue is the other classic source, since its exhaust slows and cools in all that extra space.
We scrape a sample and film the flue. Powder and flakes brush away; a coating that shines like enamel will not.
Brushes for the first two stages. For glaze, a remover that turns it brittle, time for it to work, then mechanical removal.
Loosened deposit drops to the smoke shelf and the firebox floor. Every bit of it goes out of the house in sealed bags.
A second camera run shows clean tile, and shows any crack the deposit had been covering.
In April 2001, weeks after the Nisqually earthquake, University of Washington researcher Derek Booth was quoted by ScienceDaily describing the Seattle fault as a kind of lens: it concentrates the shaking of deep earthquakes, so one zone is hit harder every time. The paper he later co-wrote for the Seismological Society's bulletin names 1949, 1965 and 2001 as the three shocks that damaged the area's unreinforced brick chimneys, and says West Seattle held clusters of severe damage on all three occasions.
Now put creosote in a flue with that history. A sound liner keeps a chimney fire, if one starts, inside the tile. A liner with a quake crack does not, and the deposit hides the crack from any flashlight. This is the reason our removal work ends with a camera, and the reason we sometimes come back to an owner with a second finding they did not ask about.
What this work is quoted at for Fauntleroy homes — the exact figure comes from the $99 on-site inspection, credited toward the work.
| Service | Price in Fauntleroy | What that covers |
|---|---|---|
| Creosote Removal | From $245 | Priced by creosote stage — glazed stage 3 is the heavy end |
| Chimney Sweep | $189–$449 | Full flue swept, Level 1 inspection included |
| Chimney Inspection | $99 plus tax | Level 1 visual; Level 2 adds a full camera scan |
| Chimney Relining | From $1,900 | Full-length stainless liner, sized to the appliance |
| Chimney Repair | From $425 | Masonry repair — brick and mortar, scoped after diagnosis |
Ranges are what these jobs are quoted at in Fauntleroy. The exact figure is set on site after a $99 inspection (credited toward the job if you go ahead), and you approve it before any work starts.
Fauntleroy is a cove neighborhood in the southwest corner of Seattle that began as a summer colony in 1904, on Fauntleroy Cove, with permanent homes that go back to 1907 and hillsides that filled in after World War II. We work every part of it — Endolyne included.
FauntleroyKing County, WA · 47.523, -122.394
Before and after
Illustrations of what each repair changes on a typical chimney — not photos of a specific job.
Before
After
Before
After
Before
After
Four steps, each one on paper — so you always know what happens next.
Choose a genuine opening on the crew's calendar. Confirmation is immediate.
Liner, crown, cap, flashing and masonry examined in order — each finding photographed.
One document, plain numbers, covering only the work your chimney genuinely needs.
The repair is completed, then handed over with before-and-after photos of every item.
It is the fuel of chimney fires. It ignites at flue temperatures a hot fire can reach, and it burns far hotter than a flue is meant to contain.
Because that is a chimney fire by another name. Tiles crack, and heat reaches the framing around the stack.
Grading the deposit on camera is $99 plus tax. Accept the removal quote and we strike that $99 from it.
A $99 on-site inspection, a written quote before any work, and photos of every item we touch.
