Buckley Rumford fireplace disaster

so we're in littleton mass today and i'm going to show you around this chimney uh wasn't built that long ago this chimney was built in 2012 uh by a mason around this area was built this guy was building his dream home here and he really wanted to build a rumford fireplace after you know looking into different style fireplaces and finally he settled on to a uh a buckley rumford which a buckley rumford is just uh it's along the lines of the original uh rumford fireplace uh the only the only difference is they make it kind of into a kit and they give you the specific uh dimensions for everything and uh you know so you buy all these kit pieces and you put it together it comes with instructions it makes it pretty easy to put together it might be kind of expensive to buy the kit compared to just doing it yourself um but it definitely makes it easier so this guy he wanted to hire a a pro someone who was really familiar with building rumford fireplaces and the builder told them absolutely not we're going to use my mace and my mason's the best so we're going to just take a look at his chimney and see how he did so this is it the tall one um we're probably maybe 35 feet from the foundation here so as you're coming up you're gonna notice this is it's a little weird here um you know they built the foundation jog way out and so they've done this crazy thing at the bottom which is not a good design in any way you shouldn't be doing this a lot of the water is hitting that and it's going to be potential problems later and you know if you look at the brickwork you know look at this brickwork i mean a bird a bird could could perch on that you know uh this brickwork is not level in any way uh matter of fact some of the brickwork up there is so far out of level uh i i couldn't imagine this is a um now i don't know why anybody would put that brick in either these big chunk out of it uh so this door here is um underneath the fireplace you can see the windows the fireplaces on the first floor this door was meant to be an outside air uh outside air kit or out outside air for the fireplace the problem is this outside air vents into this massive chamber under here uh and just goes down towards where the clean out doors would be and everything so it's just it's basically under the clean out trap in the fireplace uh and you know that's a big problem well you know these these holes are just open to air so the guy was constantly getting cold air and he ended up having to fill this with insulation [Music] uh the other thing is the code uh you know they don't want you you know the minimum uh the minimum for outside air is six uh square inches okay so uh but the maximum is like 55 square inches and this that's that goes for anywhere in the channel right so uh obviously this if you know it's big anyway but then if you go into a huge open cavity uh it's way more than 55 inches so you can't be doing that um and so he had he had huge problems with it uh so he he filled it with the spray foam insulation he'd rather you know crack his window to get a little outside combustion air if he needs it and then he's put this double wash on you see that double wash i don't know why anybody would do that it doesn't make any sense and if you look up the line of the chimney i don't know if you can see that but that is just wild just wild okay so uh let's go take a look at the top so uh first you can see there's no bond break like always and look how crude look how crudely done this crown wash is i mean it's just the guy didn't spend any time on that at all so this guy's getting water uh in on his uh this is all spray foam insulation under here so he's getting in water on the bottom sides of his wall so what happens when water gets in with spray foam is it kind of rides the top for a while and then it will just end up on that bottom wall uh so he doesn't see it right here but i'm pretty certain it's coming from sorry about that it's coming from this flashing because i mean look at this flashing it's uh it's kind of a joke and you know look under there there's nothing it's he's just rested on top of the roof and there's nothing under here there's no ice on water shield there's no uh step flashing um you know you can't just lay flashing on a roof like this without without having some sort of step flashing uh i'm not there because because you've got just big holes for water just to i mean water just comes down the roof and can just go right in uh so and then notice the lead's all brown here um so i'm actually just going to replace all this lead uh the the leads kind of it's all turned brown and nasty and so this brick is like a uh kf antique brick i think and i think that he just put a really heavy acid wash on it and the acid wash has done this to the to the lead so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna replace it how how i replace it and uh some of these shingles like the shingles crack so um i can replace the shingles so i've asked the homeowner and sure enough he's got a couple shingles for me i always ask the homeowner if they got a bundle of shingles kicking around it'll save you a little bit of time and headache trying to find some i just want to show you something that's actually kind of funny uh if you look in here if you look in that crack right there look at that if that's not a sign of moisture i don't know what it is those are those are like um those are mushrooms i don't know if those are some kind of uh it might be an oyster mushroom or some beach mushrooms boonchemy munchrooms look like the mushrooms you buy in that section at the grocery store let's look at the brickwork just i mean is this rough really around the littleton mass area that was an exceptional mason supposedly builder said it was uh the best mason ever and the guy couldn't he couldn't hire his own mason to do this because his mason was the best let's hop up and take a look okay yikes some cracking cracking i don't know if you can see how crooked that chimney is but probably not it's just it's just wild if you look down the edge and then you look in the flue here [Music] in the morning isn't even tidied up the motor on the floor or anything this is this is the spare flue that goes to the the basement so one of the problems that he's having is when he has a fire in the fireplace it smokes out the basement so we're trying to figure out his problem um might be a bit of a stack draft problem but but he's got this flu um completely insulated up down there except for the outside of the thimble but if you notice right here between the flues obviously these glues are so tight that there's no divider wall in there there should be a four inch divider wall solid divider wall between your flues uh no matter the reason there should always be a four inch divider wall between your flues uh unless you're doing like some kind of shotgun fireplace where it needs two flues to run a fireplace that's the only time you can ever have two flues not petitioned apart so yeah look he's got just a hole for water and maybe you know smoke could get pulled through that cavity i don't know it's the same on this side just a big hole in into the chimney so i'm going to resurface this crown wash i'm going to put a custom stainless cap on here uh and i'm gonna redo the lead i just had to bring my level up here to show you guys just to say maybe you can appreciate how bad this thing is just i mean all angles of this thing it's just it's just i don't know what it is like look okay we're touching here now look look i mean this is just i mean just inexcusable like let's go let's go plum from down here and just look how far this guy was the best uh best bricklayer little tin massachusetts i mean well i mean what my level's doing i never see nothing like it i wish i could say that i've actually seen stuff like this too but not from the best brick layer i mean i didn't do work like this when i was 16 years old just just amazing this guy this guy this guy right here he got 25 000 to build this chimney and he got paid okay i just switched cameras there um yeah so the code would uh i would think that this throw piece here if you read the code it says the throat should start eight inches up um and we got about four and a half inches before that throw piece throat piece starts uh if you have a depth of 20 inches then you only have to be eight inches up when your throat starts from this from this lintel okay if we're shallower like a traditional like a like a rumford should be then we would have to be up 12 inches before that throat starts and i don't know if that's how the buckley rumford suggests you should build it in their plans but i know when you read the code that's what it says 8 inches or 12 inches to the start of the throat and that would be the start of the throat because this is the throat piece so the other thing is the outside air okay oh how in the world is this fireplace gonna get outside there we saw the the outside air clean out outside but uh oh we have a okay we have a louvered door oh my god oh look at the air rushing look at the air rushing nice that's because that big clean-out i i ripped that clean out door open earlier and uh it's just letting air rush into this massive cavity down there so i'll just cover that back up i can't imagine that that would be good for the fire to have that much of a puff of air coming through there anyhow ah you know the brickwork here is just like i don't it's just childish i don't even know what the word for it is but yeah very strange uh i i can't i don't know why anybody would want to build a rumford fireplace like this uh i'm pretty sure that the people from buckley rumford would not want you to build the fireplace like this and i know that the count rumford would be rolling in his grave if he saw a fireplace built like this you know he did it better hundreds of years ago than what this is this is kind of laughable and once again this fireplace he's got a fireplace and just a flu that goes down to the basement and this guy in 2012 charged 25 000 for this fireplace and it's literally a joke okay so i just popped this clean out door off and i'm just gonna get ready to um the guy wants to just toot this brick where i can uh it's a little jagged but i ought to be able to tooth it in my brickwork might be a little bit crooked just trying to match that um anyhow so yeah i'm just gonna saw cut this out and tooth it in with some new brick but uh let's take a look in here and see like this is a massive cavity uh and it's obviously way too big for you know to have outside air like this what are we looking at here okay so the guy did some cut some flute pieces and he spanned the flute pieces over here emphasis is the ash dump which is supposed to be outside air i don't know this block work in here is just gross nothing's tidy nothing's full brickwork is the same it's amazing that's what okay yeah well that's that yeah i don't know this guy got paid just as much as any qualified uh you know bricklayer or fireplace builder um obviously you know just bottom of the barrel but you know he got paid just as much as anybody else to do this uh it's just mind-blowing maybe even got more than you know than qualified people just you know it's sad to see the worst thing about this chimney and fireplace is that this this is in littleton massachusetts and the building inspector was here to inspect this uh the building inspector signed off on all this stuff this guy obviously had no idea what he was doing but the building inspector came and he let this all fly and i just want to say that that is actually really sad and that this is why we need educated building inspectors so so guys like this can't go around and just keep building uh garbage and and charging top dollar to these homeowners that i mean they're just unsuspecting they think that they the the contractor has a qualified mason uh and it turns out they're just they're not and and i know there's not a lot of qualified people left partly because tradition is not being passed down father son anymore and it's harder to learn and you can't just go take a fireplace building class and just learn how to do it you have to literally build a hundred fireplaces to learn how to build fireplaces um or or if you can get on the job with somebody who really is a master at what they're doing that's the only way to learn uh and then you can learn in short order um so you really have to learn from someone who's already learned these hard lessons and and is willing um to put in the time to to build something uh quality into code and regulations and work with the building inspectors um so you know that part of it's a shame because the homeowner they shouldn't shouldn't have to pay this this much money for a fireplace and just have it be so bad

Channel: Chad Vaillancourt

Views: 26,076

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Id: T1AwhqZWalE

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021