The Unturned Stone

Work continues on the walkway and steps in the thyme filled front yard. These step stones are about four inches thick and the steps themselves are just over six inches tall. The two middle steps have incredible rust patterning on their faces, I presume from water that leached into fissures in the stone.

We’re replacing an already existing dry laid walkway that had led to the front door. It was built on an incredibly deep bed of sand, in some places eight inches thick. This soft sand was like a mole playground and we discovered countless tunnels as we flipped the old stones out of the way. Our gravel base will be less inviting to moles.

This past Sunday I put the finishing touches on this short stack of steps and adjacent walkway that lead into a tumultuous garden in South Asheville. The next project will extend the flagging at the top of the steps, including more leaves. I have a slab of granite picked out, but haven’t settled on a particular leaf yet.

Click this image for a full-sized version of this view of the inside of the cabin as it stands right now.

On Thursday we started a new project in North Asheville, creating a formal entrance as part of an extensive house renovation. The entranceway was designed in collaboration with Tony Hauser and Beth Gillespie of Ambient Design Group. This project has been in development for over a year and so it’s very exciting to actually be on site and working.

The house site is situated down a steep slope and the house entrance is a few feet below the driveway grade. A block wall retaining system holds up the driveway. It was suggested that we apply a stone veneer to the block wall. I have never seen this done and perhaps it is a standard practice somewhere, but it seemed like a very poor choice. The block wall is dry laid. Though it’s unlikely to move, it still has that ability. Building a rigid structure on the face of a flexible one seems to be inviting disaster. Leaning a dry stacked stone wall against the block wall was also suggested, but our stone wall would have only been a foot thick and not at all integrated with the wall behind it. I decided that the best solution would be to have a distinct footer for our work. The walls we’ll build will be structural, free-standing, sitting squarely on their own deep footing. This will be a little bit of stone veneer applied to the house foundation to blend the work together.

The first order of business was to install several granite monoliths, standing upright on a concrete footer. We used nylon straps, chains and Lewis pins to rig the stones so they could be lowered into the hole with the excavator. Danny Joe Brown, the excavator operator, removed the bucket to reduce the boom weight and to fit the arm into smaller spaces.

The machine, a 12,000 pound Bobcat, handled the work perfectly, even when craning 3,000 pounds rocks into a six foot hole. Danny Joe has 25 years experience and it showed. We all felt completely safe and never once had a worry that we or the property were in any danger.

We used Lewis pins drilled into the top of the stones to set the smaller rocks. These pins are rated for 3,000 pounds and are placed into drill holes without epoxy; the angle of the lift pulls the pins tight and prevents them from slipping out. The rigging is cinched so tightly to the excavator thumb so that we could slide the stone underneath the eaves of the house. The gutter and fascia boards were only about three feet above the top of the stone. Tight rigging and deft excavator work made all the difference.

The first monolith in place. The random board on the house is a bumper that will be removed later. Wood siding will disappear into that space with enough room for air circulation to ensure the boards don’t retain moisture.

The view from the driveway at the end of the day. We didn’t use the Lewis pins to set the two monsters that frame the top of the steps, each weighing over 3,000 pounds. We lowered the giants down into the hole flat using chains wrapped around their middles. We then stood them up by wrapping them with nylon straps that cinched the tops snugly. We could do this because the stones were tall enough so that, once placed, the straps weren’t pinned against the block wall.

This patio is part of the project that features the Big Bench

seen below. Made primarily of Hooper’s Creek flagging, it also includes tumbled sandstone cobbles, river pebbles and other found stones. There’s even a millstone visible in the top left corner with a small depression in the center.

More to come…

In the hottest part of a 90+ degree day, we set this 1,500 slab as a bench as part of a patio project off Tunnel Road in Asheville. Despite its mass, this particular stone lacks tensile strength- a previous slab of similar dimensions had broken in half when flipped over uneven ground. We coaxed this one out of the truck down wooden ramps braced with old pallets. We made very sure to not shock load the timber ramps, as they would have surely broken.

It took four of us to flip the stone using rock bars. Three of us would have a ‘bite’, meaning we had good leverage under and good contact with the stone. The fourth person would pull their bar clear and get a deeper bite and continue lifting. Once they had a solid bite, the next person would pull their bar, re-bite and so on, so that incrementally the stone was raised and flipped. We flopped it over onto a couple of pallets, minimizing he likelihood of another fracture. The line visible in the stone was made with a diamond blade on a cut-off saw. We wanted to reduce the depth of the bench stone but didn’t want to risk drilling and wedges. Once flipped, we cut the other side.

The bench base is seen above, a dry laid double sided stone wall. We designed the bench to sit in the corner of the patio area. We planned that the front corners of the bench would be flush with the wall, but there would be a six inch overhang along the face. This allows you to tuck your legs under the bench and provides a nice shadow effect from across the patio. We slid and nudged and cajoled the stone into position using rock bars, an inch or so at a time.

Setting this monster was the last act of the day. We will add cap stones to help tie the bench to the wall. We also still have quite a bit of flagging to do before the patio itself is finished.