How Ashby Chimney Austin Came to Austin
We didn’t start Ashby Chimney Austin to build a big company. We brought it here because Austin homeowners kept telling us the same story: someone came out, quoted one price, then the number changed once the ladder went up. Or the sweep left a mess in the living room and couldn’t be reached when the smell came back two weeks later. That’s the industry in too many places, and honest people in this city deserve better.
The deciding moment happened on a job in Crestview. A homeowner showed us a receipt from another company for a sweep and a full liner replacement. The liner wasn’t new. It wasn’t even replaced. It had been painted over with a coating that started flaking within six months. That family paid for work that didn’t exist. We stood in that living room and realized the problem wasn’t a lack of chimney companies in Austin. It was a lack of ones that showed people the flue before asking them to believe a word out of our mouths. So we built this branch around one simple habit: every recommendation comes with pictures. If we say a liner is failing, you see the cracks. That’s the whole idea, and it’s the reason this branch exists.
Nathan Corliss’s Personal Connection to the Chimney Cleaning Trade
Nathan Corliss came into this trade the way most people do: through the smell of creosote and the realization that nobody else wanted to deal with it. His first season in chimney work was spent as the guy holding the drop cloth and the flashlight while a more experienced sweep worked above. What stuck with him wasn’t the soot. It was how many people looked relieved when the inspection actually showed them something real. A photo of a cracked flue tile. A damper that wouldn’t seat. A bird’s nest packed against the smoke shelf. These weren’t scare tactics. They were evidence, and evidence changed how people made decisions about their own homes.
Over the years, the work became personal. Nathan has been on roofs in Wells Branch when the January wind cuts through a jacket, and he has crawled into fireboxes in Manor where a family has been burning green wood all winter and didn’t know what creosote glaze looked like until he showed them. The job asks for patience and honesty in equal measure, because most homeowners don’t know what a healthy flue looks like, and they’re trusting whoever holds the camera. That trust is the actual work. The brushes and the vacuum are just the tools that earn it.
What gets him out of bed is a homeowner who has been told something confusing by another company and just wants a straight answer. If Nathan weren’t doing this, he’d still be working with his hands somewhere in the trades, probably on a roof somewhere, because he likes work where the result is visible and the standard is simple: did you do what you said you would?
Meet Nathan Corliss – The Person Behind Every Job
Nathan Corliss is the Owner & Founder of Ashby Chimney Austin. Trained in chimney inspection, sweeping, and repair, he has spent more than ten years learning what a firebox should look like, what a flue should sound like when tapped, and what a homeowner should be told when the answer is simply, “You’re fine. No work needed.” That last part matters. Not every visit ends with a repair, and the ones that end with an honest clean bill of health build more trust than any invoice.
Nathan isn’t a corporate franchise technician sent to hit a sales number. He’s a local operator who lives in the Austin area, works in the Austin area, and treats every fireplace like it belongs to a neighbor, because in most cases it does. He is committed to one thing above all: every customer gets the truth about their chimney, backed by photos, with a written price before any work begins.
Our Promise to Austin Homeowners
Our promises are written down, because spoken promises are too easy to forget. Every job gets a written price before any work starts. You’ll know the number before a brush touches your flue, and that number doesn’t change because the job got harder than expected. We work in real arrival windows, so you’re not waiting on a four-hour hunk of your day that turns into a whole afternoon.
When the job is done, the site is cleaned. Drapes get covered, floors get protected, and the fireplace looks better than it did before we arrived. And the work itself is covered by the Kingswell Guarantee, which is in writing. If a repair fails inside the guarantee period, we come back and fix it at no charge. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s the minimum standard for working in someone’s home.
Our Credentials
Ashby Chimney Austin operates to the Kingswell standard: every pro working under our name is required to hold the license and insurance their state requires. We carry the coverage a homeowner should expect before letting anyone onto their roof or into their flue, and our local reputation in Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown, Kyle, Buda, and the surrounding communities is built on that accountability.
What this means for you: when someone works in your home, you need to know they’re covered if something goes wrong and that the company behind them takes its obligations seriously. Licensing and insurance aren’t marketing badges. They’re the difference between a contractor who can be held accountable and one who disappears when a repair fails. We’ve structured this branch so that accountability isn’t optional.
Rooted in Austin
We work in neighborhoods across this city, from Wells Branch to Shady Hollow, and we see the differences in how a fireplace behaves in a Hyde Park bungalow versus a newer build in Buda. Different builders, different flues, different needs. We know which neighborhoods see more creosote from heavy winter burning and which ones deal with nesting season problems come spring. That local knowledge doesn’t come from a training manual. It comes from showing up. That’s why residents searching for chimney cleaning in Austin, Round Rock, or Georgetown find that the work holds up, year after year. We’re a local business working to a national standard, and the combination works because the people doing the work know the place they’re working in.