Squirrel in Chimney in Lexington, MA

Massachusetts has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, and that history is a big part of why searches like "squirrel in chimney" are so common here. A chimney built in 1910 was designed for coal or wood heat and open fireplaces, not for modern appliances, modern fuels, or a century of freeze-thaw weathering. Many local chimneys still have unlined flues or original terra-cotta tiles well past their service life. So if you are dealing with this problem in an older home, you are in familiar territory for our crews. In this article, Upside Down Chimney Sweeps explains what is likely happening inside and outside your chimney, how age changes the diagnosis, and what a lasting repair looks like. Questions along the way? Call our Melrose office at (781) 653-5644.

Massachusetts homes are old — genuinely old, not real-estate-listing old. Triple-deckers from the 1890s, Victorians with three flues in one stack, postwar capes with hastily added fireplaces: each era brought its own construction habits, and many predate flue liners entirely. An unlined or deteriorated flue lets heat and gases reach parts of the house they were never meant to touch. That is why this issue deserves more attention in a Massachusetts home than the same symptom might get in a newer build elsewhere. The original masons did excellent work with the materials of their time, but no chimney was designed to go a century without attention, and most around Greater Boston have outlived their builders by decades. Understanding your chimney's era is the first step toward understanding what is going wrong with it.

Chimneys hide their problems better than almost any other part of a house. The flue interior is invisible without a camera. The crown is above the roofline where nobody looks. Flashing failures leak into wall cavities and show up as mysterious stains rooms away from the chimney. Even serious creosote accumulation is out of sight the moment you step back from the firebox. This is why homeowners are so often blindsided — not because they were careless, but because the evidence was structurally concealed. It is also why the chimney trade leans so heavily on scheduled inspections rather than wait-for-symptoms maintenance. By the time a chimney problem is visible from the living room, it has usually been developing for years. The search that brought you here may be the first visible edge of something older.

Animal & Nest Removal in Lexington, MA

Please do not try to smoke an animal out. It is the single most dangerous piece of folk advice in this trade. Lighting a fire under a nest of dried twigs ignites a flue blockage directly above your firebox, and lighting one under a trapped animal usually kills it where it sits, leaving you with a carcass wedged above the damper and an odor problem that lasts weeks. Squirrels are a special case: glazed clay flue tiles offer their claws no grip, so a squirrel that falls past the smoke shelf physically cannot climb back out. It is not visiting your chimney at that point; it is trapped, dehydrating, and desperate, and it needs to be lifted out by someone with the right equipment.

Upside Down Chimney Sweeps handles the entire problem end to end, which is what separates a chimney company from a general trapper. We remove the animal, strip out the nest, sweep the flue, sanitize the smoke shelf, verify the damper still seats, and install a properly sized stainless steel cap so the den site is closed permanently. We follow NFPA 211 and Chimney Safety Institute of America (CSIA) guidance on flue inspection during every removal, because nesting activity frequently hides damage you cannot see from the hearth. If you are hearing something in the chimney right now in Lexington, call (781) 653-5644 and we will walk you through what to do before we arrive.

That scratching, chirping, or frantic fluttering coming from behind your fireplace wall is one of the most common calls we take every spring and early summer. A chimney mimics the hollow tree that raccoons, squirrels, chimney swifts, and bats have denned in for thousands of years: tall, dark, sheltered from hawks and weather, and gently warmed by the house below. An uncapped flue in Lexington is an open invitation, and once an animal moves in you are dealing with far more than noise. Nesting material chokes the flue, droppings carry real pathogens, and a mother raccoon guarding kits on the smoke shelf will defend that ledge aggressively. We remove the animals humanely, clear every trace of the nest, and seal the chimney so it never happens again.

What the Service Includes

How We Diagnose and Fix It

Professional chimney diagnosis follows a structure defined by NFPA 211, which recognizes three levels of inspection. A Level 1 inspection covers readily accessible portions of the chimney and is appropriate when nothing has changed and no problems are suspected — the standard annual checkup. A Level 2 inspection goes further: it adds accessible attics, basements, and crawl spaces, plus a video scan of the flue interior, and it is the prescribed level whenever a property is sold, a heating appliance changes, or an event like a chimney fire or severe storm may have caused damage. Level 3, rarely needed, involves opening up concealed areas of the structure. For the problem behind your search, a sweep will match the inspection level to the situation — and a symptom with an unknown cause generally justifies Level 2 scrutiny.

Fixing water intrusion is about sequence: seal the entry points from the top down, then protect the surfaces. That typically means crown repair or replacement first, since the crown is the chimney's roof; then a properly sized stainless cap to keep rain and animals out of the flue; then flashing — the layered metal where chimney meets roofline — repaired or replaced with counterflashing cut into the mortar joints rather than smeared over with roofing tar. Only after those are sound does waterproofing make sense: a vapor-permeable masonry water repellent that lets trapped moisture escape while blocking new absorption. Paint-like sealers that trap moisture inside brick actually accelerate freeze-thaw damage. Each layer protects the ones below it, which is why piecemeal fixes so often disappoint and a whole-system approach holds up for years.

Warning Signs to Watch For

• You hear scratching, scurrying, or thumping inside the chimney, especially around dawn and dusk.
• High-pitched chirping or raspy chattering from the flue that gets louder when a parent animal returns to feed young.
• A musky, ammonia-like, or decaying odor drifts from the fireplace and gets worse on humid days.
• Twigs, leaves, grass, or tufts of insulation are poking through the damper or dropping into the firebox.
• Flies keep gathering at the fireplace glass or hearth, which often signals a dead animal above the damper.
• A fireplace that drafted fine last season suddenly pushes smoke back into the room.
• You find droppings, feathers, or shredded nesting material on the smoke shelf or hearth.
• Your chimney cap is missing, visibly damaged, or was never installed in the first place.
• You keep seeing squirrels or a raccoon on the roofline near the flue, particularly in early morning.
• You hear frantic, repetitive scrambling that never progresses upward, the classic sound of a squirrel trapped on slick flue tile.

Why This Matters in Lexington

Lexington's housing spans colonial-era landmarks near the Battle Green, gracious early-20th-century homes, and vast neighborhoods of 1950s and 1960s capes, ranches, and split-levels built during the postwar boom, nearly all with fireplaces. In recent decades many of those mid-century houses have been replaced by large new homes with multiple gas and wood-burning fireplaces. That churn means we see everything from Revolutionary-era masonry to brand-new prefab systems.

Lexington homeowners renovate and rebuild constantly, and chimney evaluations are a standard part of both teardown decisions and historic restorations near the town's Revolutionary-era district. The town's older fireplaces often date to eras with no lining standards at all, while the newest homes rely on manufactured systems with strict clearance requirements. Either way, documentation-quality inspections are valued here.

Spring is when winter sends Lexington homeowners the bill. As temperatures stabilize, the damage done by months of freeze-thaw cycling becomes visible: hairline crown cracks that widened, mortar joints that crumble at a touch, brick faces flaked off onto the roof, and white mineral staining called efflorescence, which is a chimney's way of announcing that water is moving through its masonry and leaving dissolved salts behind on the surface. None of these symptoms improves on its own, and all of them worsen faster once water has an established path. A spring inspection catches the winter's damage at its cheapest stage, and leaves the whole summer, the best season for masonry work, to repair it properly.

What It Typically Costs

An inspection is the least expensive service a chimney company offers and the one that determines everything else, so it is worth understanding what you are paying for. A proper inspection is methodical: firebox, damper, smoke chamber, accessible flue, crown, cap, flashing, and exterior masonry, all documented with photographs. Where conditions warrant, a video scan of the flue interior shows what no flashlight can, including cracked tiles and failed joints deep in the stack. The report you receive should let you make decisions calmly, with evidence, ranked by urgency. Paying for that clarity once a year, as NFPA 211 recommends, is what allows every other chimney dollar you spend to be spent on the right thing.

Why Call Upside Down Chimney Sweeps

One thing homeowners appreciate about Upside Down Chimney Sweeps is that we handle the whole chimney, not just one slice of it. Sweeping, camera inspections, cap and damper replacement, crown repair, flashing, waterproofing, repointing, liner installation, and full rebuilds all live under one roof. That breadth matters because chimney problems rarely respect trade boundaries: a leak may involve the flashing, the crown, and the mortar joints all at once, and a company that only sells one fix tends to see only one cause. Because we diagnose and repair across the entire system, we can recommend the remedy the chimney needs rather than the one we happen to offer. Fewer handoffs also means one point of accountability from first call to final walkthrough.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get It Handled Today

From our shop on Sewall Street in Melrose, Lexington is a short and familiar drive, and that proximity is worth something practical to you: prompt scheduling, easy follow-ups, and a company whose reputation lives in the same corner of Massachusetts as your home. When you call (781) 653-5644, you reach people who know these towns, these winters, and these chimneys. We will set an appointment, arrive on time, protect your home while we work, and leave you with a written record of everything we found and everything we did. Local is not a slogan for us; it is the business model. We would be glad to add your chimney to the neighborhood we look after.