I have a no-longer-in-use brick chimney running from basement to attic (roof was closed over it), left over from earlier heating systems. The space alongside it is being used for plumbing and electrical, so it would probably be a pain to actually recover those few square feet... but it has me wondering:
How would one extract a brick chimney embedded in the middle of a house? Open up one of the adjacent walls and attack it with rotary hammer? And would the years of combustion residue -- gas and oil most recently, but I suspect there were one or more woodstoves originally -- be a significant health hazard, or just a mess?
(If I don't extract it, I'll probably want to cap it off to make sure it isn't breaking my air-sealing. Thoughts on an easy/cheap way to do that also welcome.)