How Level Two Chimney Newark Was Born in Newark
Seventeen years is a long time to watch the same mistake happen over and over. We’ve been part of the Level Two Chimney family since 2009, and when the opportunity came to bring that standard to Newark, we knew exactly why this city needed it. Newark has some of the oldest and most beautiful housing stock in New Jersey. Ironbound rowhouses with brickwork that’s seen a century of winters. Forest Hill Victorians with chimneys that were designed for coal, not gas. Weequahic homes where the masonry is as original as the hardwood floors. These are structures worth protecting, and too many of them have been getting the flashlight treatment: a technician squints up the flue, says it looks fine, charges for an inspection, and leaves. No camera. No documentation. No proof.
That never sat right with us. Level Two Chimney Co. had been running camera-scan inspections as standard practice years before anyone required it. The footage gets archived. If a liner fails, we can prove what it looked like before the failure, not scramble to explain it after. That practice is now Clause 4 of the Haven Standard: Evidence on every job. Bringing that to Newark wasn’t about opening another location. It was about giving homeowners here something they weren’t getting anywhere else: an inspection that actually looks inside.
Corrine Halstead’s Personal Connection to the Chimney Cleaning Trade
The first time you see inside a chimney with a camera, it changes how you think about the whole house. Corrine Halstead remembers that moment clearly, early in her career, standing beside a tradesman who was training her on the inspection rig. The camera crawled up the flue and the monitor lit up with something neither of them expected: a cracked tile liner in a home where the previous inspection had been marked clean six months earlier. The homeowner had been told everything was fine. It wasn’t fine. And the only way to know was to look.
That’s the work. It’s not romantic, and Corrine wouldn’t pretend otherwise. It’s creosote on your sleeves. It’s the smell of soot that lingers on your hands even after you scrub. It’s cold mornings on a rooftop in January when the wind off the Passaic River cuts through everything. But it’s also the look on a homeowner’s face when you show them the footage and they understand, for the first time, what’s actually going on in the chimney they’ve lived beside for years. That’s what gets her out of bed. Not the sweeping itself, though there’s a quiet satisfaction in doing it right. It’s the moment of clarity. The part where evidence replaces guesswork.
She’s spent more than ten years in this trade, long enough to know which neighborhoods in Newark have flues that run cold because of how the houses were originally built, long enough to know that a DuraFlex liner is sometimes the right answer and sometimes the wrong one, depending on the house. She would probably be doing something with her hands regardless. Cabinetry, maybe. Furniture restoration. But chimneys found her first, and she stayed because the stakes are real in a way that keeps the work honest.
Meet Corrine Halstead – The Person Behind Every Job
Corrine Halstead is the Owner and Founder of Level Two Chimney Newark, the local branch serving Newark, Harrison, Kearny, East Orange, Elizabeth, North Arlington, Bayonne, Jersey City, Roselle Park, Roselle, Linden, and the Financial District. She came up through the trade the hard way: learning on actual job sites, working through the awkward early years, earning the knowledge that only comes from hundreds of real inspections. She holds the licensing and insurance required in New Jersey, and every pro working under the Level Two name in this market is held to the same requirement.
What separates her from a corporate technician is simpler than a list of credentials. Corrine still looks at every inspection as if the house belonged to someone she knows. Because in Newark, it often does. This is her community as much as her service area. When she’s not on a roof or behind a monitor reviewing flue footage, you’ll find her restoring old furniture in her garage, a hobby that shares the same instinct as chimney work: you don’t guess at what’s underneath. You look, and then you act on what you see. That’s the commitment she makes to every customer: no recommendation without evidence, no work without a written price first, and no leaving a job until the homeowner understands what was found and what should happen next.
Before
AfterOur Promise to Newark Homeowners
The Haven Standard isn’t a slogan we hang on the wall. It’s a five-point code we work to, and every point exists because a homeowner somewhere got burned by the alternative.
Have it in writing. Clause 1 of the Haven Standard means a flat price, a written scope, and a written warranty before anyone starts. Not a verbal estimate. Not a handshake number. Paper. If a company won’t put the price in writing before they start, that tells you something. Our customers don’t have to ask for it; it’s automatic.
Arrive on schedule. A real window, a named tech, a text when they’re on the way. Your time matters as much as ours. In a city where parking alone can be a project, being on time isn’t courtesy. It’s competence.
Verified crews. Licensed, insured, background-checked. The license number goes on the page, not in a drawer somewhere.
Evidence on every job. This is the one that matters most to Corrine. Photos. Readings. Footage. You see what we saw. You don’t take our word for it, and we don’t ask you to.
No surprises. No door upsell. No scope creep. No “while we’re in here, you should also…” The price we quoted is the price you pay, unless you approve something in writing first.
Our Credentials
Level Two Chimney Newark operates under the standards set by Level Two Chimney Co., which was founded in 2009 and has inspected and cleaned tens of thousands of chimneys since. The Haven Standard is the operating framework for every branch, including ours.
- Licensing: Every pro working under our name in New Jersey is required to hold the license the state requires for chimney and venting work. We don’t bend on this. If someone can’t produce the license, they don’t wear the uniform.
- Insurance and bonding: Every pro is required to carry the insurance and bonding their state requires. Homeowners should never have to wonder whether they’re protected if something goes wrong.
- Experience: Corrine Halstead brings more than a decade of hands-on chimney and venting knowledge to this market. The brand she works under has been doing camera-documented inspections since 2009.
- Reputation: We’re a local business serving Newark and the surrounding communities. Our reputation is built job by job, on the evidence we hand to every customer.
Why does this matter to you? Because the person standing in your living room or on your roof is working inside your biggest investment. You should be able to verify they’re legitimate before they touch a single brick. And you should get documentation of what they found when they’re done. Those two things together are what separate a professional from a gamble.
Rooted in Newark
This isn’t a territory for us. It’s home. Corrine knows the difference between a Forest Hill chimney built for coal and an Ironbound flue retrofitted for gas, because she’s worked on both. The neighborhoods here aren’t just zip codes on a service map; they’re places where the quality of the masonry tells you something about the decade the house went up, and where the weather coming off the rivers shapes how creosote builds up over a winter. When a homeowner in Kearny or Harrison or East Orange calls about a draft problem, we don’t have to guess what kind of house they’re in. We already have a pretty good idea, because we’ve been inside hundreds of them. That local knowledge, paired with a camera and a written record, is what we offer. It’s what this city deserved all along.
Written by Corrine Halstead, Owner at Level Two Chimney Newark, serving Newark and the surrounding communities since 2009.