Forum Archive: Posts by: CGDad

Two years ago, I noticed a strong smell of gas in my second floor bedroom. The gas company came to investigate a possible leak, and it turned out that my neighbor had turned on an old gas fireplace in his neighboring townhouse for the first time in over a decade, and the exhaust fumes were seeping through the chimney/flue that runs between our two attached houses, and into my bedroom through the wall, mainly around some electrical sockets. The gas company sealed his fireplace on the spot as a dangerous health hazard to my family and forbade him from using it. The neighbor, who can be a pretty difficult guy, claims that prior owners of my house (with whom he apparently had some legal issues) must have dislodged several bricks that damaged his flue when they were upgrading my home’s electrics the year before I bought it. He therefore wants me to rip open my bedroom wall, replace electrical sockets and patch up alleged holes in the brick chimney behind the drywall so he can use his fireplace. He has furnished no evidence to substantiate his claim that the prior owner of my house somehow knocked a hole in his flue. When I ask him whether he has ever had his chimney properly lined, he gets angry, saying only that he is an architect and he knows what he is talking about. He has yet to give me a yes or no answer as to whether he has a properly lined chimney – he simply gets angry when I ask the question, and accuses me of obstructionism by not agreeing to rip open my bedroom wall to take a look. I hardly want to block my neighbor from being able to use his fireplace, but I am certainly not willing to have toxic fumes come into my bedroom or my kids’ bedrooms. I don’t want to rip open my walls — certainly not at my expense — without receiving any grounds to suspect that this might solve the problem. The neighbor fought with me for a year, stewed silently for another, and now has started up again. He is a retired architect who spends a lot of time digging around the DoB and through his wife, is threatening to start filing violations on my property (no clue what) to force me to rip open the walls. I don’t want World War III with my neighbor, and am at a loss for the best way to handle this. Suggestions welcome. I have thought of a) finding a neutral chimney specialist (not someone of his choosing) to come and check out the situation to give an unbiased opinion as to what will make his chimney harmless; b) if there is indeed a problem that can be accessed only from my side, I am not averse to to allowing some work from my bedroom, at his expense, but I am not comfortable about liability issues about having someone else’s workers in my space. Any ideas?