Stone masons

It’s been over a week since our last blog post and while we haven’t gotten much done, here are some photos of what we’ve been working on. It’s amazing what moving in will do to your motivation level!

Last weekend's project was to build the stone wall behind our woodstove. We recruited my dad for this one since he’s the yoda when it comes to stonework. For the past month or so we’ve been collecting local Catoctin greenstone from old walls on my parents property. It’s kind of awe inspiring to think about the people who came before us and collected the stones from the fields and woods to build the walls that we are picking through. Here we are, probably over a hundred years later, gathering stones from these dilapidated walls to use behind our woodstove. Every now and then we’ll find a stone that we think will be perfect and we show it off to one another. I still find it hard to believe that my dad put up all the stone on his house.

Here’s our stone pile…The blank canvasWe mixed the mortar, brought in a bunch of stones, then Dad quickly got to work.Things were going along great until we had a minor setback. When we were about halfway up the wall, everything on the right side collapsed when Todd went to put in another hanger. The body language in the photo below pretty much says it all... We asked my dad if that has ever happened to him and he responded, "never." We laughed in disbelief, then rebuilt that side with completely different stones. We learned that we shouldn't go too far up without letting the stone set.We'll be back at it tomorrow night and hopefully we'll be close to finished.