Last Thursday and Friday, Frank had worked his way around to the front of the house, primarily on the garage-street side. This is the part most people will see, so we were anxious to get this done and done right. He's a careful guy; hasn't cut a single stone so far. This is important because when you slice through Eldorado stone you see regular concrete (with fine aggregate)—not pretty or expected. The little bit of cutting that will be done are on the absolute ends of the facing, where rock abuts vertical fir trim. This way any cuts will be completely concealed.
I had had visions of doing all the rock work myself. OH how naive I still am at the tender age of 59. It would have taken me a year (owing to my type A personality and snails pace) and it would have looked like you know what. To do this right, you have to mix colors, sizes and shapes as you go, making sure not to make clusters (like thin stones or reddish stones). Plus we're using a dry stack technique (no mortar between stones ), which is even harder to make look good.As I mentioned before, when you lay up this sort of stone you start and the corners and tops and work down and inward. The last stone you'll lay on a wall will be on the bottom and near the middle. That way no mortar is dripping down on stones, which makes clean up easy.
After you butter the stones up (with mortar), you push the stone on firmly and it stays in place. Nancy laid one the other day, which reminded me of the time I laid a paver at the Pope's Summer Palace at Gondolfo in Italy (that is another story). Within 5-10 minutes, you'll have to pry it off if you've made a boo boo. No boo boos so far, and nearly 350 square feet of rock in is place (3 ft x 100 ft). I looks like we'll have 4 boxes of stone left over (Frank is not a wasteful guy), a box of preformed corners, and 5 bags of mortar mix. We're thinking about having him do the chimney chase, which Richard Berg designed as stone faced, but we chickened out on (too expensive on the first go around). But since we have most of the material, then another chunk of change to lay the chimney up would be money well spent.
