What We Learned About Rocks

The flagstone walk to our front door was showing serious signs of deterioration.

Here is a before picture - it does not look too awful at this resolution - 

 

... but close up the wide mortar joints were in trouble with serious cracking and loss of material. 

We were never all that happy with the mortaring, nor with the work on the front step, which had some interesting gaps on the outer edge.  The next photo shows the edge of the step overlooking the path, with a nice gap that you could lose a heel in and that was not the only one like that. The photo also illustrates another serious issue - even if the mortar could have been chipped away and repaired, our flagstones were delaminating.  The chips on the step at the lower center are the broken remains of a layer from the rock on the right, but you can see the same problem in the stone just right of middle at the top of the photo, and this deterioration was happening on a majority of the stones.

As we remember it, our builder sent us to the stone yard where we wandered around looking at stacks of rocks in cages, boulders, and stones suitable for a fireplace hearth.  We finally found someone to ask where we would find the flagstones for a path.  We were pointed to that part of the vast acreage and looked them over and picked a stack based on the color.  Little did we know, these stones were not appropriate for our purpose due to this inherent propensity to delaminate in a short period of time.


We hired local the local stone artists who had recently completed a beautiful sign for the town of Weaverville, and are working on a labyrinth for the First Baptist Church in Asheville.  We can only say good things about their work.  http://hammerheadstoneworks.com/  They do not use mortar at all, and typically do not install over a concrete base, as our walk had been done.  They figured out they could raise the level of the walk in some places and would only need to remove some of the concrete right next to the driveway, and when they actually started the demo work and did their leveling, they figured out the level of the front door and the driveway was nearly the same so they decided to eliminate the front step altogether.

The first photos will show some of the demolition and prep work.  The color difference under the overhang in the first photo is because of some rain.  The original concrete step is actually still there, under the gravel, with the rest of the area built up with more loose gravel to level it up.

 

This is the end of the sidewalk nearest the driveway.

And now a series of progress photos - three of these pallets of brightly colored Tennessee limestone were delivered (along with loads of gravel and dirt.)

 

 

 

Finally we have photos taken when they finished today about noon.

 The narrow gaps between the stones are filled with colored pebbles for effect - they serve no structural purpose.

Rainwater will wash some of them away - we were left with a bucket full of replacement pebbles.