Owner-Built Home & Homestead
(Page 6 of 15)
If you respond to a challenging material, and if you want a wall that is unique and beautiful, with great potential for individual expression, and if stone for this wall is locally available at little cost above hauling, then you might well consider stone masonry. My experience in this field started with brief apprenticeships to professional rock masons, and continues to this day with the construction of fireplaces and walls of various patterns and shapes. I have had to find out first hand how much skill and expense are required to lay a square yard of cut stone with line and level, and how little it takes to build a rubble wall with a movable form. I also discovered that there are certain characteristics of stones that should become basic knowledge to anyone using stone for building. Oftentimes more skill can be exercised at the rock quarry, in selecting the right stone, than in the actual placing of the stone in the wall.
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One of the very few men whom I have known to really love his work happens to be the stone mason with whom I am currently working. He finds joy in his work through respect for his few but high quality tools, through an appreciation of his hard-earned skills, and through a deep understanding of his materials. As we load each stone onto the truck at the quarry, he clearly foresees its proper and final resting place. An unappealing specimen, with rounded edges, awkward form and an uninteresting face is abruptly cast aside with a few underbreath epithets. But pure elation follows his discovery of a colorful, square-edged corner stone. From this quarry experience, I learned that more time can be saved and a better wall can be built when special pains are taken to collect only the "most fittin' " stones available.
Local stone quarries frequently sell unmarketable "rubble" at a low price. Abandoned mining operations often leave piles of satisfactory building stone. Then too, deposits of field stone and boulders can be found along streams or in the open fields. Stratified rocks, like limestone, can be worked up into practical sizes with hammer and wedges. Blasting can also be a very economical means of obtaining building stone.
Stone has much the same physical characteristics as wood. Masons talk of the "sap" in freshly quarried stone; after exposure for some time this sap crystallizes and the stone becomes harder and thus better able to resist weathering elements. The "grain" direction of a stone is an important thing to ascertain when building an exposed wall. Limestone, shale and sandstone have stratified grain, a property which makes them easy to split and chip, but in winter they absorb moisture and split when it turns to ice during a freezing spell. Usually the grain runs lengthwise. In most handlaid work one's first tendency is to place the stone with the grain horizontal and running from the outer surface toward the inside wall. But then capillary attraction draws water to the inside wall via natural splits and seams in the grain, as well as between stone and mortar. A few coatings of masonry sealer will help this problem, but the best practice is to place the stone on its splitting surface, with the grain vertical.
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