Have you ever considered getting or recommended getting a home maintenance inspection?
Let me give an example of the benefits;
If your home has a brick chimney, occasional maintenance may be required. Many people think that bricks are not affected by water, after all, Bricks don’t rot do they?
No, bricks don’t rot but water does have an effect on them. When it rains, most of the water will run down the wall but a little bit will absorb into the bricks and mortar. The moisture content of the bricks will fluctuate as the weather changes. This is nothing to worry about. The problems occurs when the bricks stay wet and get water logged. 
When water freezes it expands. Think about what happens to a full pop bottle when you accidentally leave it in the freezer. The bottle splits to make room for the expanding pop. Why doesn’t the bottle break when there is only an inch of pop in it? That is because there is lots of room in the empty part of the bottle so the pop can expand without any trouble.
This is the same for brick and mortar. A bit of moisture in the brick has room to expand into the pores of the brick but if the pores are full of water the expansion will cause tiny cracks to form in the brick as the freezing water expands. The next time these tiny cracks will get bigger and eventually pieces of the brick will fall right off.
Back to the chimney. There should be something called a chimney cap at the top of a brick chimney. The chimney cap is designed to direct the away from the top of the bricks so the water doesn’t get into the bricks or between the bricks and the clay flue.
This is what prevents the bricks from doing the same thing what the pop bottle did in my example.
At a home inspection I found a chimney cap that has been needing some repair. It looked fine from the ground but a closer inspection showed that the top had deteriorated to the point that water would stay on top and actually direct the water down to the bricks and the flue. (See the yellow arrows.) 
The house was about 60 years old. The bricks on the rest of the house were in good shape but the bricks on the chimney? Not so good.
As you can see, some of the bricks have the front face split right off. The white stain is also a result of the water problem. (The stain itself is not serious but it is an indicator of a serious problem.)
At this point the chimney will need more than maintenance; it needs repair. Maintenance of the chimney cap could have prevented this.
Hiring a home inspector when buying or selling a home is a great idea but also consider hiring an inspector to do an annual maintenance inspection. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (or for the younger generation, a gram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure.)
Submitted by Bert, for Benchmark Home Inspection Services. Your Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph and Orangeville area home inspector.
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