Today, I’m continuing the story of how we’re converting a door into a window in a stone building, our Carriage House. You can catch up on part one, which includes why we are doing this, here. When we last left off, we had removed the lower half of the Dutch door in this space, removed the bottom part of the door jamb, and added a window sill. It might seem like a backwards way of doing things, adding a window sill before we have window framing or even the window, and it is for sure. However, this order of operations was selected for a reason. We need to fill in…

We are converting a door into a window in a stone building, our Carriage House. Want to see how that’s going to work? If so, you came to the right place. If you want to know why we’re doing this conversion, you also came to the right place. All signs are pointing to you being exactly where you need to be at this moment. Lucky you! Multiple entrances to a building are usually a good thing. Multiple entrances to a building are unnecessary if they are 18 inches apart and open into the same room. It would be like having two front doors, and that’s exactly what is happening with…

It’s Reveal Day! Welcome back to our Curved Fieldstone Wall series. I’m so glad you’re here. In August, we decided to reconstruct the crumbling fieldstone walls in front of our house. We reused the original stone to build the new wall. We used lime mortar to keep it historically accurate. We added a little flair to the wall design to call it our own. After 75 days of solid work, we can finally call this fieldstone wall complete. Thank. Goodness. Here’s how it started. The wall definitely exuded a certain old house charm if you didn’t look too closely to see that it was barely hanging on. This wall was…

Welcome back to our Curved Fieldstone Wall Series, where we attempt to rebuild the curved fieldstone walls in our front yard using historic masonry techniques. This is part eleven of a twelve-part series, which is your not-so-subtle hint that we are almost done with this project! I don’t know whether to cheer with joy or weep with relief. Maybe both? If you’ve been following along for this entire series, thank you! If you haven’t and want to catch up, I’ve linked the entire series at the end of this post. Today, we are discussing the swoop. If that wasn’t a technical term, it is now. The original curved fieldstone wall…

Welcome back to our Curved Fieldstone Wall Series, where we attempt to rebuild the fieldstone walls in our front yard using historical masonry techniques. When we last left off, I had shared the progress on the second section of the wall and the potential problem with road salt. You can catch up on that here. Now it’s time to share the plan for the mailbox and gate. Don’t worry. There are also progress pictures on the wall itself. I wouldn’t deprive you in that way. To put it delicately, the gate and mailbox have seen better days. They both have some rot and peeling paint. The gate requires a complicated…

Welcome back to our Curved Fieldstone Wall Series, where we attempt to rebuild the fieldstone walls in our front yard using historical masonry techniques. When we last left off, I had shared the progress we had made on building the second section of the wall. You can catch up on that here. Today, I’ll share more progress (yay!) and discuss the one thing out of our control with this project – salt. Personally, I’m a big fan of salt. We need it to stay alive. It makes food taste delicious. What’s not to love? Guess what isn’t a fan of salt? Lime mortar. What are we using to build our…

Welcome back to our Curved Fieldstone Wall Series, where we attempt to rebuild the fieldstone walls in our front yard using historical masonry techniques. When we last left off, we had built the first wall section, demoed the second wall section, and built stairs. Anyone tired yet? Ha! Now, it is time to connect the stairs to the second wall section and show you the progress we’ve made with the second wall. I’ve been working on it every day for a few hours, and the unvarnished truth is it’s a slow slog. The main reason why it is so slow is that we are reusing the rocks from the old…

Welcome back to our Curved Fieldstone Wall Series, where we attempt to rebuild the fieldstone walls in our front yard using historical masonry techniques. Today we are talking about the stairs between the two wall sections. The first wall section is already complete. The stairs were not a part of the original plan. We intended to leave them alone because we were going to exercise restraint, like the reasonable DIYers that we are. Hahahahahaha. The original stairs connecting the driveway to our sidewalk were concrete, which makes sense. The sidewalk and the stairs match. The stairs were a little wonky in size, and one looked newer than the other, but…

I’m back with part 6 of our Curved Fieldstone Wall Series. This time we’re discussing demo of the second wall section we’re working on. Here’s the thing about our DIY projects. They never go according to plan. Why do we bother planning? I don’t rightly know. We expected the demolition of the second wall section to go as quickly as the first section. While the second wall section is twice as long as the first, it was built the same way. In addition, a quarter of it had already demoed itself for us. THAT’S the kind of effort we like to see from inanimate objects. I guess the rest of…

We’ve been working on rebuilding a curved fieldstone wall in front of our house. Part of that wall connects to our front porch, and a little oopsie occurred to the porch wall while doing demo. We didn’t intend to touch the porch while doing this curved fieldstone wall project. We know when our plates are full. Unfortunately for us, the unintended consequence of jackhammering three inches away from the porch was that the vibrations traveled, and we cracked a section of the skim coat covering the porch foundation. That was fine. We could probably fix it. Then, much to our horror, the cracked portion of skim coat FELL OFF the…