What should I expect when removing a chimney?

Question

Our brick chimney is leaning away from our house. The breast is in the living room, pretty much flush with the wall. The backside starts in the attached garage, goes through its roof and up past the second floor house roof.

We are thinking of removing it to below the garage roofline so we don't have to deal with the living room at this time. We also have a metal roof very much like this but not as steep:

The chimney basically goes through the peak of the garage roof, although not quite centered.

I expect we'll need a roofer and someone else to patch the vinyl siding (there is none where the chimney used to be against the house.

What kinds of things should I expect? Cost (understood to be very general), approach (hopefully not throwing the bricks down the chimney), damage to roof besides closing the hole, or anything else to watch out is what I'm after.

Answer 1

We were able to find someone to do this. They removed part of the roof on the garage and built a ramp over the ply wood to toss down bricks. They removed it to below the roof of the chimney and patched the hole in the roof and reinstalled the metal panels. They also put siding on the house where the chimney was.

No mess in the living room and it was about a fifth of the price of a teardown and rebuild, approx. $2300. This is in New England, so price might vary. Also, the foundation for the chimney wasn't done right when built, which is why the rebuild price would have been so high.

Answer 2

Just in case someone else looks at this I will add an answer since Andy's answer seems a little off.

First to tear down a chimney is about $1000 in the US. There is siding, roof, and other repairs that have to be made. Not sure what Andy had going on since we never got a picture. $2500 might not be way off if they had to do a lot of things after the tear down.

Why I am writing this is the quote on the new chimney. You will still have to pay about 1K to tear down (and this is a definite DIY deal) and break up footer (if you need to). Not rocket science. The hardest part is getting rid of the bricks after.

The cost of materials really depends on what you want. But a 30 foot chimney can be made with 600-800 in materials and might average around 1500. Mason will cost on the low end $1000 and high end $2000 - extra $200-300 if you make them pour the footer (another easy DIY). The mason I have used charges me $1200 and he is done in 2.5 days.

So if you do the easy DIY things you are at 1500 in materials and 1500 for mason - so a good medium to high estimate is 3K. Add another 1K if you don't want to do anything.