Where We Work

Thirty Miles Apart and Three Different Jobs

These sit within half an hour of each other and do not produce the same work, which is why each has its own pages rather than one page with the name swapped.

Rapid City is built on hills inside a basin, and both facts matter. The hills mean the two sides of one house can be at completely different heights from where a ladder can safely stand, so access drives our pricing more than roof size does. The basin means winter inversions - cold air pooling on the valley floor under warmer air aloft - which is the most common cause of spilling we diagnose in town and the one most often mis-sold a chimney cap. Its housing also carries a cohort: after the 1972 flood the city cleared the floodway along Rapid Creek into parkland and razed or relocated what stood there, so a great deal of the surrounding stock went up inside a very short window.

Box Elder has grown from 11,946 people in 2020 to roughly 14,857 now, the fastest of any South Dakota town above ten thousand, driven by around two billion dollars of work at Ellsworth for the B-21 programme. Almost nothing here is masonry. It is factory-built systems in framed chases, which means no tile to crack, sections rather than liners, and a set of first-year findings - construction debris left on the firestop, collars fitted out of sequence - that have nothing to do with soot.

Sturgis is northern foothills: older stock, wood as real heat, and unlined stacks under inserts fitted decades later. It also has an unusual amount of short-term rental, and a stove operated by a different guest every few nights produces deposit that does not match the volume burned. Its draft problems are the mirror image of Rapid City's - they show up on windy days and vanish on still ones, usually because an addition put the chimney in the lee of a higher roof.

Same pricing in all three, no travel surcharge. Rapid City runs through the week; Box Elder and Sturgis have set route days, which is how they stay at the same price.