Columns: contrasting styles
Friday, March 13th, 2009
We have been working on these four columns for the last few days, when the weather cooperates. They are built of a Virginia sandstone that we are taking pains to lay in the bedded plane. That can be difficult in a narrow veneer. The wooden timbers are not on center or square to the house, meaning we have varying amounts of room to work on each side of the column. It gets very narrow on the back and we have been using the diamond blade to get stones down to a settable depth. These columns are set on a very solid footer and we have used brick ties throughout the work. This is not the Unturned Stone’s typical project, but it’s been fun. Hornets have been hatching out of the column over my head on the suddenly hot days and I have become a trowel foo expert at dispatching hornets.
I found this column in progress on a construction site near my house. This is what is called cultured or faux stone. As a mason working almost exclusively in natural stone, I can’t help but have some strong opinions of this material, which is colorized concrete. It is becoming increasingly common because it is cheaper and faster to install and I’ll venture requires less skill than stone. The area is generally prepped as for a tile application, which saves time and money as well.
My favorite part of this picture is how the column appears to be levitating. Stone is often added to commercial buildings like this to give a sense of presence; it’s a solid, reliable, grounded, permanent institution, that just happens to hover a few inches off the ground. Is that false advertising?
The homeowner commented that a handful of the paving stones look like the coat of a brindle dog.
The reclaimed bricks originate from the 
Last week Fred and I built this stoop in north Asheville. It’s part of a design by Landscape Architect Tony Hauser of 
On my birthday, my son Abraham and I built this small stone lantern out of leftover chips from the Thyme project. It’s lit by a single light bulb and rather short and squat. Small whimsical projects like this help me understand more about how stone works- and fails to work- and gives me ideas for larger, more permanent structures.
I visited the Thyme Project at dusk on a very rainy day. The rain and the light combined to give the stonework its richest colors.
After finishing the front yard, there was a small project around back at the Thyme House. This step up onto the back deck had caved in over the course of its short life (less than ten years.) The exposed paint edge shows how much it had settled.
Removing the step tread revealed this interesting arrangement. The riser stones are snapped square, so set well, they’re unlikely to shift, but they still seem too thin to me. The bigger problem being that there’s no back edge to support the step, or prevent the fill from trickling out. Dried leaves are not an effective backfill. Don’t look too closely or you’ll see the leathery corpse of a rat, again, not recommended backfill.
The real problem revealed itself as I dug further. The step rested on a patio that sat on twelve inches of shifting sand. Sand is great for leveling under flagging, but I don’t suggest it as a structural fill. Other parts of the flagging have been compromised by moles burrowing through the sand. Immediately behind the step, under the deck, the ground slopes away quickly, giving the sand a place to slump towards. Gravity won and the whole thing relaxed.
I neglected to photo the small underground retaining wall I built to support the flagstone patio, that then supported the new step. I decided to stack stone instead of re-using the snapped edging. I did use a couple of pieces as tie stones, reaching toward the center of the step.
The old step made new again.
I have just begun selling note cards and art prints featuring photographs of stonework. I have one set of cards available of work done by the Unturned Stone. More sets will soon follow. 
We finished the wall feature earlier this week on a cold, soggy day. It’ll be a little while before the yard recovers, but even amongst the mud, one can see how the wall and walkway trace each other through the yard. In some places they echo each other and in others they drift in their own directions, meeting again at both ends. The tallest section of the wall is about sixteen inches. One-man boulders pop up here and there as step-downs, places where the wall drops to stay in scale against the sloping yard.
Friday we built a bench in the Thyme yard. We cut the bench from a much larger slab. Our finished sitting stone is 6.5 inches thick and weighs somewhere around 700 pounds. The pencil lines indicate the layout for the supports below. The curved face of the bench takes advantage of the gentle curve of the stone path that runs by it.
The bench supports are castle blocks, very uniformly snapped chunks of Tennessee sandstone, each one weighing about a hundred pounds. Using two blocks below a single helps the supports distribute the weight more evenly into the ground. Note the gravel bed and the nearby tamper. Also note three different levels which were all getting good use. There was a torpedo level, a two foot and a four foot level that I switched between as I set the blocks. Amazingly enough, even though everything’s yellow, I still misplace stuff all the time.
