How Hearthstone Chimney Co. Was Born in Chesapeake
Back in 2014, we were working as a sweep for another outfit when a call came in from a homeowner in Great Bridge. The woman on the phone was shaken. Another company had just left her house with a $4,200 estimate for a full liner replacement, and they’d told her if she used her fireplace that week, her house could burn down. She had a wood stove. It was November. She was going to pay it.
We went out that afternoon. The liner had some creosote buildup, nothing more. A standard sweep and a camera inspection showed it was sound. We charged her for the sweep. She sat at her kitchen table and cried, not from relief but from anger at being played.
That evening we called the owner of Hearthstone Chimney Co. and asked what it would take to open a Chesapeake branch. The brand was already there in other markets, already doing things the old-fashioned way: certified sweeps, camera inspections, plain-English reports. Chesapeake needed that. We opened our doors three months later with one promise - nobody who calls us gets scared into work they don’t need.
Russell Haines’s Personal Connection to the Chimney Cleaning Trade
We didn’t grow up wanting to clean chimneys. We grew up in a house with a wood stove in the basement, and every October our father would wrestle a brush up the flue, cursing the whole way. The smell of creosote meant winter was coming. The smell of wood smoke meant we were safe and warm. That was the whole vocabulary we had.
The trade found us in our twenties, working construction in Suffolk, picking up whatever subcontracting we could. A mason we knew needed someone to run a brush for a week. We said yes because the money was there. By day three we were crawling into a firebox in Hampton Roads humidity, soot black to the elbows, and something clicked. The work was physical, diagnosable, honest. You could see what was wrong. You could fix it. Nobody could hide behind a screen of jargon because the homeowner was standing right there, watching the camera feed with you.
That was over a decade ago now. We’ve swept chimneys in Chesapeake through humid Julys and Nor’easter Januaries. We’ve found bird nests the size of basketballs in Suffolk flues and pulled them out by hand. We’ve sat with homeowners in Carrollton who hadn’t had their chimney inspected since the Reagan administration and explained, slowly, why that mattered. The work doesn’t get old because the houses are different every time, and the people are different, and the problem is always its own puzzle.
If we weren’t doing this, we’d probably still be in construction, still picking up whatever work came. But we’d miss the part where you hand a homeowner the tablet and show them the inside of their own chimney, the cracks they didn’t know were there, the creosote glazing that could have caught. We’d miss the part where they understand, really understand, what they’re looking at. That’s the part that gets us out of bed. Not the sweep itself. The seeing together.
Meet Russell Haines - The Person Behind Every Job
Russell Haines is the Owner and Founder of Hearthstone Chimney Co. here in Chesapeake. He’s a CSIA-certified sweep with Level-2 inspection training and a decade-plus of hands-on experience in Hampton Roads masonry and venting systems. Russell doesn’t manage from an office. He’s on the truck, on the roof, in the firebox. He knows the difference between a Gelco cap and an Olympia Chimney liner because he’s installed both, in this county, in houses he can still point out when he drives by.
What sets Russell apart from a franchise technician is simple: he’s not trying to get to his next appointment. He’s trying to get this one right. He keeps bees in his backyard in Western Branch. He’ll talk your ear off about colony collapse if you let him, and that same patience applies when he’s explaining why your flue needs a HeatShield application versus a full reline. His personal commitment is straightforward - every homeowner gets the same inspection he’d want for his own mother, and every recommendation comes with photos you can see for yourself.
Our Promise to Chesapeake Homeowners
Our values aren’t posters on a wall. They’re the K.E.Y.S. we work by, and they were tested the hard way.
Krafted right means we use DuraFlex liners when the job calls for them, not whatever’s cheapest this quarter. It means our masons know the difference between Type N and Type S mortar, and they mix it themselves. We’ve walked away from jobs where the homeowner wanted a shortcut we couldn’t live with.
Every time means the 400th sweep gets the same ladder placement, the same brush pressure, the same camera documentation as the first. We don’t get sloppy in February because we’re cold and tired.
Your home first means we lay down runners without being asked. It means we explain before we sell. It means if we find something that can safely wait a season, we say so. We’ve told homeowners in Smithfield their liner has three years left, and we’ve lost that job to a competitor who told them it was urgent. We sleep fine.
Standing behind it is The Keystone Standard: 90 days, in writing, no arguing. If it’s not right, we come back. No paperwork war, no phone tag. Applied to chimneys, that means if a cap we installed leaks, we fix it. If a sweep missed something we should have caught, we make it right.
Our Credentials
Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license and insurance their state requires. Here’s what that means in practical terms:
- State-licensed - Virginia requires specific credentials for chimney and venting work, and we maintain them without exception.
- Insured & bonded - protection for your property and ours, because we’re working on your roof and in your living space.
- Years of local experience - we’ve swept, inspected, and repaired chimneys across Chesapeake, Suffolk, Carrollton, Smithfield, Newport News, Poquoson, Franklin, and Gloucester Point. We know the clay soil that shifts foundations and cracks masonry. We know the salt air that corrodes caps faster inland.
- Strong local reputation - built one appointment at a time, one homeowner at a time, since 2014.
These credentials matter because chimney work happens inside your home, on your roof, around your family. A state license means someone’s verified the training. Insurance means if a ladder goes through a window, you’re not calling your own agent. Local experience means we recognize the 1960s ranch house in Great Bridge because we’ve been in twenty just like it, and we know where the builder cut corners on the flue.
Rooted in Chesapeake
We’ve swept chimneys in Greenbrier, in Hickory, in the older neighborhoods off Battlefield Boulevard where the houses still have the original masonry fireplaces from when they were built. We’ve worked Saturday mornings and driven past the farmers market on our way to appointments in Deep Creek. Our hours are Monday through Friday 7:00 AM to 7:30 PM, Saturday and Sunday 8:00 AM to 6:30 PM, because that’s when Chesapeake homeowners are home and able to let us in. The hearthstone is the stone the whole home gathered around, and in this city, we’re still gathering.
Written by Russell Haines, Owner at Hearthstone Chimney Co., serving Chesapeake since 2014.