How Kindling Chimney Brooklyn Was Born in Brooklyn
We didn’t start Kindling Chimney Brooklyn with a grand plan. We started it with a phone call from a homeowner in Flatbush who had been told, by another company, that she needed a new chimney liner at a price that made her voice shake when she repeated it to us. Danny Cortes went out to look. The liner was fine. What she actually needed was a sweep and a new rain cap. The whole thing took under two hours.
That moment stuck with Danny for weeks. Not because the other company had been wrong, but because she had no way to know they were wrong. She was standing in her own living room, looking at a sooty brick shaft she couldn’t see into, being asked to trust a stranger’s word about work she couldn’t verify. She nearly paid for it. A lot of people do.
Bringing the Kindling Chimney Sweep brand to Brooklyn meant building the kind of chimney company Danny had always wanted to work for: one that shows you the evidence before you spend a dollar, one that writes the price down before the work starts, one that treats a brownstone in Bed-Stuy and a co-op in Canarsie with the same care. That Flatbush homeowner became one of our first recurring customers. She still gets swept every fall.
Danny Cortes’s Personal Connection to the Chimney Cleaning Trade
Danny got into this work the way a lot of people get into trades: sideways, through another job, and then never left. He spent his early years in Brooklyn working building maintenance, the kind of job where you learn a little about everything because the building throws everything at you. One winter, a tenant on the top floor of a walk-up in Bushwick complained about a draft and a smell she couldn’t place. Danny went up to look. The chimney cap was rusted through, the flue hadn’t been swept in years, and there was enough creosote built up that he could scrape it off in sheets with a putty knife.
He remembers what it felt like standing on that roof in the cold, looking down the flue with a flashlight, realizing how close that building had been to a chimney fire. He also remembers what it felt like fixing it: the satisfaction of cleaning something no one could see, of making a home safe in a way the family inside would never fully understand because they shouldn’t have to. That became the work.
There’s a smell to a flue that’s building up creosote, a sweet, sharp, almost acrid odor that most people only notice when it’s already too far along. Danny knows it now the way a baker knows when bread is done. He can tell you about the way soot clings differently to brick depending on what wood you burn, and why that matters for how often you need a sweep. The work is repetitive in the best way: every roof is different, every flue has its own history, and every home has people inside it who deserve to be warm without being at risk. That’s what gets him out of bed at 7:00 on a Monday morning in January, and it’s what keeps this business honest.
If he weren’t doing this, Danny thinks he’d probably still be on a roof somewhere, fixing something. He just wouldn’t be as happy about it.
Meet Danny Cortes – The Person Behind Every Job
Danny Cortes is the Owner & Founder of Kindling Chimney Brooklyn. He’s a state-licensed chimney professional with years of hands-on experience cleaning, inspecting, and repairing chimneys across Brooklyn and the surrounding areas. He’s worked on everything from pre-war brownstones to newer condos, and he’s spent more time on Brooklyn rooftops than most people have spent on Brooklyn sidewalks.
What sets Danny apart from a corporate franchise technician is simple: he’s here. He knows which neighborhoods have older flues that need more frequent attention, which buildings have the kind of mortar that spalls in a freeze-thaw cycle, and how wind moves differently over the rooftops in Ozone Park versus the Upper East Side. He doesn’t clock in and clock out of someone else’s service area. This is his service area.
When he’s not on a roof, Danny is a runner. He’s done the Brooklyn Half more times than he can count, and he says the best way to learn a borough is to run it street by street. He brings that same patience and attention to every chimney he works on.
If we wouldn’t feel safe with our own kids sleeping in the house, we won’t leave the job that way. That’s the standard.
Our Promise to Brooklyn Homeowners
Every job we do is covered by The Cedarwell Care Promise, and it shapes how we work from the moment we arrive. We wear shoe covers inside the house and lay down drop cloths before any tools come out. We ask before we move or touch anything. We respect your time and your quiet hours, which matters when you’ve got a toddler napping upstairs or a dog who’s already suspicious of strangers. We use pet-safe products where there’s a choice, because your pets walk on those floors after we leave.
And before any work starts, you get a written price. Not an estimate delivered verbally, not a range that shifts once we’re on the roof. A written price. If the camera inspection shows a problem, you see the photos. You see exactly what we see. Nothing gets recommended without evidence you can look at yourself. That’s not a policy we hang on a wall; it’s the only way we’ve ever wanted to work.
The C.A.R.E. code isn’t just a poster. It’s four things we do on every single job: Clean up like it’s our own home. Ask before we move or touch anything. Respect the family’s time and quiet hours. Explain the price before the work. If we miss any of those, we’ve missed the whole point.
Our Credentials
- Licensed: Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license their state requires for chimney work.
- Insured & Bonded: We carry the coverage homeowners should expect before letting anyone work inside their home.
- Local Experience: We’ve worked across Brooklyn long enough to know this borough’s chimneys, its weather, and its building quirks.
- Strong Local Reputation: Our business has been built on word of mouth from homeowners in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Flatbush, and beyond.
Why do these matter to you? Because hiring someone to work on your chimney means letting a stranger onto your roof and into your home. A license means they’ve met their state’s bar for doing that work safely. Insurance means you’re protected if something goes wrong. And local experience means they’ve seen your kind of chimney before, in your kind of building, in your kind of weather. You shouldn’t have to take any of that on faith.
Rooted in Brooklyn
We live here. We work here. We know that a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant has different chimney needs than a postwar building in Middle Village, and that the salt air off the Gowanus affects flashing differently than the inland neighborhoods. We’ve swept chimneys within sight of the Williamsburg Bridge and across the rooftops of Borough Park. This isn’t a territory we were assigned. It’s home.
Kindling is what every good fire starts with. A clean, inspected chimney is what keeps it safe.
Written by Danny Cortes, Owner at Kindling Chimney Brooklyn, serving Brooklyn and the surrounding neighborhoods.