New stone walls

On previous posts we've talked about using local greenstone in and outside of our house. Not all the rocks we find we'll work for the facade type work so we've been tossing them aside with the intention of doing something with them. Two years have passed and we have finally decided to turn the rubble into respectable stone walls. Given all the other outstanding projects we have going on, we decided to hire professionals to build the walls. Here are a bunch of photos including a few old shots we took when the woods looked more like a jungle. The crew blew through our piles pretty quickly and needed more rocks so we took Bobby (the Bobcat) into the woods for more. Every night last week and last Saturday we spent hauling rocks. Each bucket load of rocks in the bobcat weighs about 1,000 lbs and with Willy and Holmes' help we hauled about 40 loads. For those without a calculator that's 20 tons! Check out this cool rock that's split down the middle…You never know what you'll find in the woods. Sugar anyone? We hung a handful of siding boards in between rock loads. And here's Willow napping in the grass. I love her dirty nose!It was a family affair on Saturday…Here's how things used to look around our shed…And now time for a before and after… The finished walls look awesome.Here's our driveway entrance.We didn't plan on having this done but it was too hard to pass up.

Stone update

We finished up our stonework last week and are really happy with the way things turned out. Thanks Dad! It was a little tricky trying to find the perfect stone to work around the top of our stove pipe but after a little effort we found the right one. (No Scott, that's not a cannon poking through our wall!)

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.