We’re back at the cabin. Yesterday we pulled the first two lintels we set, deciding they were too uniform and looked too much like curb stones. We replaced them with these massive granite chunks. The one to the foreground weighed 1500 pounds. Visible through the window opening is the gin pole system we rigged to lift and position the stones. We used Griphoist® hand-operated winches.
More photos to come.
We just finished this retaining wall, built in place of an older version that was tumbling down. This beautiful stone home is a historic landmark and so the new stonework had to resemble the earlier wall and fit the period aesthetically. To that end, we tore down the old wall and re-used all the original stone. We also hunted high and low for a local fieldstone that closely resembled the original material. We mixed this new stone into our building pile at the very start of the project, to ensure that the new and old stones were distributed evenly across the face. The joinery of our dry-stone wall is inspired by the work on the main house, a structural fieldstone structure built in 1903. More pictures to come- including a very neat little love-seat nestled in the end of the wall- as the landscaping gets done.
This is the beginning of what I hope will be a very long project, creating a space collaboratively with a gardener at her home. We will take it in phases, perhaps over years, drawing inspiration from the stones we find and the way the garden grows. I am delighted that we don’t have a formal plan, but I still like it when there’s a certain cohesion to the way a design develops. I hope that this leaf will be an element of that, by filling the garden with small pieces like this mixed into the walkways and beds. This leaf was a quick test, a generic shape cut from a salvaged granite countertop. A diamond blade saw and grinder did most of the shaping and Dremel rotary tool etched the lines. I intend the pieces for the garden to be specific leaf shapes, so that one can walk through the whole garden and identify the stones as trees. I plan to start with easy stuff like birches and magnolias before moving into some of the maples and oaks. I am already looking forward to making sassafras leaves.
Someday I will build a terrazzo, a Venetian mosaic floor.
We peeled the tarps off the oven today and finally added the roof. The mosaic idea was abandoned as impractical and costly. Instead we built a dry stacked stone roof out of about 3,000 pounds of the thinnest, most colorful veneer stone we could find.
It was an interesting experiment laying a dry stone roof. The technology has been around for centuries, but isn’t practiced much anymore. I found one picture somewhere in Wikipedia and some images of trullo and other Italian building styles in an amazing book called Stone Shelters. Since we were covering a solid structure, our tiles are stacked on the oven itself and other stones. All the tiles pitch towards the sides and there are a couple of bigger cap stones on the topmost seam to hold everything down and prevent rain from infiltrating from above. The tiles all move a bit, but are well anchored by their placement and other stones placed on top of them
We may add a course or two to the chimney to balance the look and improve the draw. As it stands now, the chimney cap, hewn from the same slab of Crab Orchard as the countertop, is not mortared in place.
