THE STONE HEARTH at Tom Clark’s Bruce Beach, Ont., cottage has presided over four generations of family history—raucous card games, fishing tales, even the anxious war years before Tom’s time, when his father was overseas. “Those were the only summers at the cottage my father ever missed,” says Tom, a Texan whose own northern pilgrimage has also been disrupted, this time by COVID.
But the sands of time—or to be more exact, the chimney’s shifting foundation—haven’t been kind to the structure that Tom’s great-grandfather built in 1922. Now it’s Bruce Beach’s own Leaning Tower. “It has moved seven inches in my lifetime,” Tom says. Not only that but the chimney is leaning on the cottage frame, so “the floor is stressed, the door is stressed, the ceiling, the roof, they’re all stressed.” Tom is stressed too. “We don’t want to reach the level of risk where it could fall on someone.”
That’s the thing about chimneys—they’re the quiet types that you never expect to act out. “People think of the chimney as a simple exhaust system, but it’s more than that,” says John Gulland, one of the originators of Canada’s Wood Energy Technical Training (WETT) certification program. Chimneys are among the hardest-working structures in the cottage—“the engine that drives the wood-heating system,” as Gulland puts it.
Chimneys whisk smoke up and away, shield the cottage from toxic combustion gases and dangerous heat, and supply the all-important draft for efficient burning. But they’re also exposed to extreme temperatures, corrosive condensation, stormy weather, and red squirrels. Before your chimney blows its top or keels over, plan an intervention. Show
