How Level Two Chimney Puyallup Was Born in Puyallup
It was late autumn, 2017. The air in Puyallup smelled like wet maple leaves and wood smoke starting up again after the dry summer. We were still working out of Tacoma then, driving the I-5 corridor for a company that sent us wherever the dispatch software pointed. A call came in from a couple in South Hill. Their chimney had been “inspected” twice that season by two different outfits, both had pronounced it fine, and now they were sitting in their living room with a smoking fireplace and a cracked flue liner they could see with a flashlight from the hearth.
We brought our camera. What we found took forty minutes to document. The liner was porcelainized clay, installed in the early eighties, with a vertical fracture running twelve feet. Both previous “inspections” had been Level 1 visual checks from the top of the flue, no camera, no written report, no photos. The couple had paid $89 and $129 respectively for what amounted to someone looking down a dark tube and guessing. They were quoted $4,200 for a full liner replacement by a third company that same week, with no camera evidence, just a verbal diagnosis and a sense of urgency.
We cleaned the flue, ran the full Level 2 camera scan, archived the footage, and showed them exactly where the crack was, exactly what it meant for their burning season, and exactly what it didn’t mean. The crack was real. It needed addressing before the next heavy season. But it wasn’t an emergency that demanded a signature that afternoon. They scheduled the liner work for spring, burned carefully that winter with the documentation they needed for their insurance, and called us back the following September to say thank you.
That drive back down Meridian toward Puyallup, we kept thinking: this market has the housing stock, the mature neighborhoods, the older liners, and nobody treating homeowners like they can handle the truth. Level Two Chimney Co. had been building the Haven Standard since 2009, archiving every scan, proving every claim. We opened this branch because Puyallup deserved that standard without the Tacoma dispatch delay. Corrine Halstead led the move. The first truck was parked outside a rental on 9th Street SW while we figured out where to store the rods.
Corrine Halstead’s Personal Connection to the Chimney Cleaning Trade
Corrine didn’t start in chimneys. She started in a job that taught her what she didn’t want, which is sometimes more useful. She was managing inventory for a building supply yard in Kent, the kind of place where contractors grab their Olympia Chimney liner kits and Famco caps on their way to jobs she never saw finished. She liked the materials. She hated the gap between what got sold and what got installed. A customer would return a Gelco stainless liner, bent, because the crew had forced it down a flue that needed relining first. She’d process the return, restock the item, and watch the same crew buy another one the next week.
A tradesman who trained us, a sweep who came through the yard regularly for Copperfield brushes and rods, started bringing her on weekend jobs to help with the grunt work. She remembers the first time she stood on a roof in Federal Way, February, the asphalt shingles still damp from overnight frost, and lowered a camera down a flue that hadn’t been opened in fifteen years. The screen showed a buildup of glazed creosote, that shiny, bubble-wrap texture that catches fire at half the temperature of regular soot. The homeowner was a retired teacher in Milton. She watched the monitor with them from the living room. The sweep explained what glazed creosote meant, how it formed, why it mattered. The teacher nodded, asked two sharp questions, and booked the sweep for the following Tuesday.
Corrine felt something shift that day. Not the romance of the trade, nothing that sentimental. The specificity of it. The way a camera and a plain explanation could replace anxiety with information. She’d spent years in an industry where information was guarded, where the gap between what a customer knew and what a technician knew was the profit margin. Chimney work, done the Level 2 way, was the opposite. The more the homeowner saw, the more they trusted you. The more they trusted you, the more likely they were to maintain the system properly, which meant they called you back, which meant you built something.
She trained formally for two years, rode along on hundreds of jobs across King and Pierce counties, worked roofs in Kent and Des Moines and Lakewood until the feel of a flue tile under a brush rod was as familiar as a keyboard once had been. If she weren’t doing this, she’d probably be back in some supply-chain role, optimizing something invisible for someone she’d never meet. The difference is simple: at the end of a chimney job, there’s a documented record of what was actually in someone’s home. There’s proof. She gets out of bed for that proof.
Meet Corrine Halstead - The Person Behind Every Job
Corrine Halstead is the Owner and Founder of Level Two Chimney Puyallup. She holds state licensure for chimney and fireplace work in Washington, carries full insurance and bonding, and has spent over a decade in the field before opening this branch. Her training includes formal sweep certification, camera inspection protocols, and the Haven Standard documentation system developed by Level Two Chimney Co. since 2009.
What separates Corrine from a corporate franchise technician isn’t credentials on paper. It’s that she still carries her own camera rig, still climbs when the roof pitch allows, and still sits with homeowners to review footage they can keep. She keeps a garden in her backyard off 112th Street, grows tomatoes she never has time to can, and believes that any job worth doing leaves evidence behind. Her direct commitment to every customer who calls (253) 323-5667 is this: you will see what I see, you will know the price before I start, and you will have a written record when I leave. That’s Clause 4 of the Haven Standard, and it’s non-negotiable.
Before
AfterOur Promise to Puyallup Homeowners
Our values aren’t framed on a wall. They’re practiced, and when we fail, we answer for them.
Have it in writing. Clause 1 of the Haven Standard means a flat price, a written scope, and a written warranty before anyone touches your chimney. We learned this the hard way early on, when a verbal quote for a cap installation turned into a dispute over whether flashing was included. Now every customer gets a printed scope, every time.
Evidence on every job. Clause 4 is the archive. We photograph the condition we find, record the camera scan, and provide that documentation before we leave. A homeowner in Sumner used our footage last year to settle an insurance question about pre-existing flue damage. The evidence was three years old, stored, retrievable.
No surprises. We don’t discover additional “critical issues” after we’ve started. If we missed something in our initial assessment, that’s our error, not your emergency. We eat the cost of our own oversight.
Our Credentials
- State-licensed for chimney and fireplace work in Washington
- Insured & bonded for residential and commercial properties
- Years of local experience across Pierce and South King counties
- Strong local reputation built through documented work and repeat customers
These credentials matter because chimney work happens inside your home’s structure, on your roof, and in systems that affect your family’s safety. A state license means the person doing the work has met Washington’s training and examination requirements. Insurance and bonding protect your property if something goes wrong during the job. Local experience means we’ve worked on the specific chimney types common to Puyallup neighborhoods, from the masonry flues in Midland’s older homes to the factory-built systems in newer South Hill construction. A reputation you can verify means you don’t have to take our word for it, you can ask your neighbors.
Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license and insurance their state requires, and to work to the Haven Standard that Level Two Chimney Co. has maintained since 2009.
Rooted in Puyallup
This branch runs out of Puyallup, not through it. Corrine lives here, shops at the farmers market when it’s running along Pioneer, and has swept chimneys in every neighborhood from North Hill to the valley floor. We’ve worked on homes near Bradley Lake Park, near the fairgrounds, in the older grid streets where the trees are mature enough to drop serious leaf load into gutters and onto roofs. We know the clay soil that shifts foundations and cracks chimney crowns, the wet winters that accelerate mortar deterioration, the specific building eras that correspond to specific liner types. We’re not visiting from somewhere else. We’re the local team that the Haven Standard happens to run through.
Written by Corrine Halstead, Owner at Level Two Chimney Puyallup, serving Puyallup since 2017.