Meet the Team - Hearthstone Chimney Co.

Meet the Jersey City Team Behind Hearthstone Chimney Co.

Our Jersey City crew isn’t a rotating cast of subcontractors. These are the same faces that show up in your driveway year after year, the ones who remember which Bergen-Lafayette row house has the squirrel-damaged cap and which Downtown condo stack needs the ladder staged just so. What ties them together is simple: every one of them has signed the same K.E.Y.S. code that Russell put in writing back in 1984. Krafted right. Every time. Your home first. Standing behind it.

Call (732) 507-9649

Our People

Russell Haines, Owner

I’m the one who answers when things go sideways on a job. Started this company in 1984 out of a garage in the Heights, back when Jersey City’s waterfront was still mostly piers and empty warehouses. Forty-two years later, I’m still climbing when the flue is tricky enough that I don’t trust anyone else to get the camera angle right. I hold a CSIA Certified Chimney Sweep credential and a New Jersey home improvement contractor registration, but the certification that matters most to me is the one I can’t frame: showing up the next day when a customer calls worried about something we touched. I live in Jersey City with my wife, still take the PATH to estimates when traffic looks bad, and I will absolutely notice if you’ve got a copy of the old Jersey Journal from 1987 in your fireplace nook.

Marcus T., Lead Technician

Marcus has been with us for eleven years, and he’s the reason we can say “most jobs completed in a single visit” without crossing our fingers. He came to us from a commercial HVAC background, which means he reads a chimney system like a mechanic reads an engine bay, not like a poet describing a sunset. His specialty is Level-2 camera inspections, the kind where he documents everything like an engineer and then explains it like he’s talking to his neighbor over the fence. He’s CSIA-certified and factory-trained on DuraFlex liner systems. Outside of work, he coaches youth basketball at a rec center near Lincoln Park, and he’s got a running bet with Russell about whether the PATH train or the Turnpike extension is more reliably late.

Elena R., Senior Installer

Elena handles our cap, crown, and rebuild work, the jobs where you’re working with masonry in Jersey City’s freeze-thaw cycle and one sloppy joint means water intrusion by March. She’s been with Hearthstone for seven years, certified in HeatShield cerfractory flue repair and trained on Olympia Chimney’s stainless systems. Before she joined us, she spent five years doing exterior restoration on pre-war buildings in the Village and Downtown, so she knows exactly how the brownstone facades in Paulus Hook and Hamilton Park age, and she treats a chimney crown with the same care she’d give a cornice detail. She keeps a battered field notebook where she sketches problem flues, and she’s got a particular hatred for the cheap wire caps that big-box stores sell to homeowners who don’t know better. Lives in the Heights, walks her dog past the old Harsimus Cemetery most mornings.

Darnell K., Service Coordinator

Darnell is the live voice you get when you call (732) 507-9649 at 10 PM on a Saturday or 6 AM on a Tuesday. He’s been with us for four years, and he’s the reason we can honestly say a real person answers every call, every hour, every day. He schedules across our Jersey City territory, from the high-rises on the waterfront to the narrow alley-access homes in Bergen-Lafayette, and he’s memorized enough parking regulations to know which blocks get street cleaning on which days. He’s not a technician, but he’s sat through enough of Russell’s training sessions to talk a homeowner through what smoke in the living room actually means while the truck is en route. He’s working toward his CSIA certification because he got tired of not being able to climb when he wanted to. Grew up in Greenville, still lives there, and will tell you exactly which deli makes the best bacon-egg-and-cheese within a ten-block radius of any address you give him.

Sofia M., Apprentice Technician

Sofia is in her second year with us, the newest face on the crew and already the one Russell trusts to handle the tight-access jobs in Jersey City’s older housing stock. She’s completed her CSIA Chimney Sweep certification and is currently training on Gelco and Famco cap systems under Elena’s supervision. What she lacks in years she makes up for in patience, the kind you need when you’re threading a camera up a flue that’s been collecting creosote since the Reagan administration. She came to us from a carpentry background, so she’s handy with the structural side of rebuilds in a way that most sweeps aren’t. She commutes from Bayonne, carries a thermos of coffee that could survive a nuclear winter, and has developed a minor obsession with the architectural history of Jersey City’s forgotten industrial chimneys, the ones that don’t get swept anymore but still puncture the skyline.

One Standard, Every Job

The K.E.Y.S. code isn’t a poster in our break room. It’s the filter every decision runs through, whether Russell is on site or not. When Marcus finds a cracked flue tile in a Journal Square duplex, he documents it with photos the homeowner can see and gives a plain-English verdict on whether it can wait or whether it’s a carbon monoxide risk that needs addressing now. When Elena quotes a crown rebuild, the number on the estimate is the number on the invoice, period. When Darnell schedules a follow-up, the technician shows up when we said they would. And if any of it isn’t right, the 90-Day Done Right Promise means we come back, in writing, no arguing. That’s how a company that plans to be in Jersey City in thirty more years acts. Russell built it that way in 1984, and the crew you just met keeps it that way today.

Written by Russell Haines, Owner at Hearthstone Chimney Co., serving Jersey City since 1984.