With Some Help From The GMC

  Dan, Damon, and I have been out in Pittston this week continuing the fabrication. The persistent cold has made for some chilly mornings, but the structure is coming along. This section is all veneer that will be above the fireplace, so the stones sitting on the ground will actually be six feet high when we install them down south.

Curtis Fields

  Earlier this week my lovely and thoughtful fiance brought me home a couple of books on stonemasonry from the library, one of which was a thin little volume called The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall by Curtis P. Fields. A Yale graduate and retired director of the Yale University Alumni Fund Association, Fields and his wife spent their last years on Penny Wise, their 200 hundred-acre farm in Vermont, where he learned to rebuild the miles of stone walls that snaked around the property.
  The book is touching in Fields' genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for the craft of stone wall building, but otherwise uninformative and at times, misleading.  His knowledge of stone wall construction basically came from the teaching of an old Vermonter, one Mr. Littlefield. This Mr. Littlefield taught him to split stone using wedges and how to stack flat rocks on top of one another, but that is pretty much the extent of it. Fields recommends the use of flat stones and doesn't even approach the art of round-rock wall building.
  I was intrigued by the descriptions and photos of the hand-tools they used to split stone with in the fields, particularly the long chisel used to "drill" holes with. The product of the modern age that I unfortunately am, I have never drilled a hole in stone with anything other than a hammer drill; and I am now on the hunt for a good drill chisel. All in all, it was an enjoyable one-hour read--being a short, illustrated 61 pages in length--but I wouldn't run out searching for a copy or add it to my personal library.

Postscript
That being said; Mr. Fields, (who passed away shortly after the writing of his book and who may be up there somewhere reading this) your passion for stonework is noted and appreciated, as is the effort you put forth in the writing of your guide. I hope you are building stone walls in the great beyond and I hope the stones are lighter there than they are here.

Ready For The Mantle

Mending Wall

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

The Last Lintel

We finally put up the last lintel yesterday, after much measuring, hoisting up and down, and notching out the right-hand jam stone. The notching was particularly tedious because it had to be done with a grinder, instead of a rock saw, which would have filled the entire house with dust and carbon-monoxide and incurred the wrath of carpenters and electricians alike. We hear enough complaining from them as it is, about our noise and our dust and rocks always in the way. Still, we are not loathed nearly as much as the insulation guys. Everyone hates them and the clouds of noxious particulate matter they create. Yesterday I said to Garrett, the head insulator, "You know, I used to think we were the most despised people on every job site, but I was wrong. Now I realize it is you. Everybody hates you."

  "Yes," he said. "It is true."
  It goes on my list of jobs I don't want to do: roofer, insulator. There. There's my list.

The First Lintel In Place

  The first lintel is set, along with the adjoining stones around the top. It was not a walk in the park. I sure hope it gets easier as we get higher. Oh wait, that isn't possible.

Last Jam

  There it is, the last jam stone. This one was particularly difficult because we had to make a three-dimensional cardboard template, which we used in Pittston to fabricate the stone. It fits perfectly now, but that was not without hours of adjustment grinding and taking the stone up and down and worrying that it was not going to work. As it stands, we still have to cut the top down and notch out for the lintel, but at least it's up.

Fabricating The Upper Reaches

 Out in Pittston for the last few days with Damon and Mark, fabricating the upper portion of the chimney. There is much more completed, however, than shown in the photo. I waited till the end of the day and by then, half of the stones were removed from the structure for pinning and adjustment.

Wall Tie

 We are using a new kind of wall tie, or at least one I have never seen. So far, they seem extremely rugged and effective.

Looks Like They Have Been Busy

  Joel has been out in Pittston this week working on fabricating the upper portion of the fireplace. He sent me some photos yesterday evening. Nice tall corner, guys.

Another Jam Stone

  The third jam stone is in place and the fourth is on its way from the shop, where Dan and Joel have been working on it. I really like this second shot, with the afternoon sun shining in. It gives me some indication of what things will be like for the owners when they are finally moved in--winter sunshine on the rocks, a fire crackling in the fireplace, those ocean views. I wonder if they'll mind if I stay.

First Stones Going Up On The Fireplace

  Last week we dismantled the fireplace at Dan's shop and transported it all down to the jobsite in Boothbay, where we rolled them up long ramps on PVC rollers and into the house. It was daunting, due to some of the stones' rather large size and awkward shapes, and at times I suspected the twenty foot aluminum ramp was going to collapse beneath the weight, but the process went smoothly and free of catastrophe.

  The first stones really started to go into place yesterday. We set up staging on either side of the chimney and ran a ten foot I-beam, from which we hung the chain-fall. Dan picked up a handy little set of "dogs" that you actually insert into 4" x 5/8" holes drilled at 45% angles in the top of the stone--the chain pulling up on these two simultaneously enables us to pick the rock up and move it around without any fear of it falling. I marvel at the simple genius of it all day long.

J.C. Stone

Damon and I stopped at J.C. Stone on our way out to Dan Ucci's yesterday morning. J.C. is our major source of stone in the mid-coast region and they have been for many years now. Specializing these days in the cutting and fabricating of truly incredible sculptural pieces for homes, businesses, and monuments; there is hardly anything in the way of rock they cannot provide. We stopped into the saw shop and I am always struck by the sheer magnitude of the diamond blade on the CNC (computer numerical control) machine they use to slice through granite blacks the size of large automobiles. It must be a fourteen-foot blade. The air inside is thick with moisture and noise and a pasty gray film of wet stone dust covers everything. It is impressive and intimidating at the same time. This is the other end of what I do, the other side of stonework, the technical side; and J.C. Stone does it well.

Joel Oyer

  Stonemason, ex-Marine, yoga practitioner, raw-foodist, father, conspiracy theorist, and some say extraterrestrial; working with Joel is always a interesting. We have intense conversations on everything ranging from politics to religion to health, and I always come away from the day knowing a little bit more about something than I did when it started. Like a handful of others I have met in this business, I feel grateful to have met him.

Up On The Roof

  Spent the last three days up on a windy rooftop stuccoing a chimney with Joel Oyer. The stuccoing itself is not so bad, but climbing in and out of the tent and up and down the ladders is a pain. The cold ocean winds beat the crap out of us and even managed to tear a portion of the tent roof off at one point. We were having a difficult time, as it was, just trying to keep the inside temperature above fifty; with a kerosene heater blowing into the fireplace below and a propane blower up on the roof. Temperatures outside on a few of those mornings were in the single digits and we often could not start applying stucco till the sun came over the trees and provided us with a little greenhouse effect through the plastic. One coat a day.
  Did I mention how much I dislike heights?