We have a brick chimney that rests on a basement foundation wall about 2' above grade (basement is 2/3 below ground). We have a trickle leak into our basement after heavy rains below the the back right corner of the chimney (opposite corner you see in this first picture (the leak is not where the broken cement is)).
Years ago, I redid the cement lip around the foundation wall where the brick rests on the foundation wall. You can see in the prior photo that it is starting to break up, so I'm going to redo it. The cement breaking up is not the cause of the leak. I've come to realize over time that when I redid this cement lip before, I covered up some or all of the weep holes accidentally, which I believe is the cause of the small leak. Live and learn there. Here is a photo of the original weep holes.
This is what it looks like now (we are now looking at the corner near the basement leak), with weep holes covered up...
I'm going to redo this cement lip properly, using Weep Shield weep hole covers in the mortar around the chimney.
With that said... my question is, because I need to build up the cement lip about 1" to run water away from the brick on the exterior of the chimney, if my new weep holes are at the 1" height of the cement lip on the exterior, will water still get trapped inside the chimney, because there is no cement lip on the inside of the brick and any trapped water will just be sitting there? Or are weep holes mainly for ventilation and not channels for water to disperse?
