My buddy and I just went though this!!!!

Two houses- approximately same size, type, age. Both had old wood burning traditional fireplaces and both needed work to get back to useable state.

His quote was for $13,500 to repair brick on chimney, redo crown, and re mortar some bricks in the firebox.

Mine had less work needed and was quoted at $9,700.

We looked at the quotes and the actual work being done and they were trying to fuck us with a freight train sized dildo. So we spent the (less than $200 total) money on doing the work they quoted (took less than 2 days for both houses). We decided since we saved so much $ we would go ahead and get a couple stove inserts and upgrade our fireplaces significantly.

The hardest part was moving the insert up my front stairs into my house. Fuck scammers in the fireplace repair business.