Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 6, How To Remove A Stone Wall
How do you remove a stone wall? The same way you build one. One stone at a time. That was not intended to be a glib response. That’s the short answer. If you want to know the specifics of taking down a stone wall, including how fun the process is, you came to the right place. The fun part is easy to answer. It’s not. I’m sure there are worse tasks though. It’s best not to think about it or wonder how long it will take. Find that happy place in your mind and get to work. As to the specifics of how we took down a stone wall, I…
Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 5, Adding A Window to a Stone Wall
Welcome back to the series on our Stone Carriage House Gym expansion. Today, I’m going to show you how we added a window to a stone wall. My speciality is very niche topics that less than 1% of you will ever need to know. Below is the stone wall in question. As you can see, aside from the window headers, the entire window opening is fieldstone and brick. The bricks will be removed partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because we need to remove that window grate. We don’t know why there is an iron grate instead of a glass-paned window in this wall, but it made the building drafty.…
One Thing That Will Wreck Lime Mortar
One thing that will wreck lime mortar on a fieldstone wall are ice melt products, specifically salt. Learn from our mistake this winter. We have a concrete porch wrapped on two sides in fieldstone. The fieldstone is adhered with lime mortar. Not a classic application of fieldstone and lime mortar, I know. Everything was fine until that concrete porch got icy during a winter storm. It was so treacherous. We didn’t even think about it and scattered some deicing salt on the concrete. I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me that stuff is not great for the environment. I’ve vowed to do better, especially after this debacle. …
Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 4, Pipes In Stone Walls
Our stone Carriage House was built in the late 1700s before indoor electricity and plumbing existed. Just think about that for a minute. If you had to do your business outside, that building is old. If you want to do your business inside this old building, some retrofitting is going to have to happen. Today, we are going to talk about the pipes in our Carriage House and how they clogged up the flow of our restoration progress as we’ve been repointing this building’s stone foundation. To plumb an all stone building, you’re going to have to bust through the 18-inch thick stone foundation or walls in order to insert…
Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 3, Old Windows
Work on our stone Carriage House gym continues and today we’re going to discuss old windows. It is hard to explain the window situation on this half of the building. I think the short answer is someone thought windows were overrated. Natural light? Who needs it? Glass panes? Metal grates are stronger. The longer answer is that on the end of the building we are currently restoring, there are two small window openings with cast iron grates instead of glass panes. Were glass panes ever there? Maybe. There is no longer evidence of them if they were there. Poof. History erased. One of the grates on the west facing side…
Did We Finally Find Buried Treasure?
If you’ve been reading this blog for five minutes, you’ll know that I am unabashedly on the hunt for buried treasure on our 250-year-old property. Surely, surely, there must be something hidden around here somewhere. Preferably, this something would be valuable enough to pay off our mortgage, but I’m not picky. We recently dug a trench alongside our Carriage House and that trench was full and I do mean FULL of buried treasure. I don’t mean the valuable sort of treasure. More like this was someone’s garbage pile. An actual garbage pile that had been buried over time, and now I’m donning my proverbial Indiana Jones hat and saying under…
Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 2, Demo
If you missed it, we are expanding our home gym. This space, that I affectionately refer to as the ‘little torture chamber,’ is located in our stone Carriage House. The part of the home gym we completed in 2024 looks like this now. The other half of the building, where we want to expand the home gym, looked like this (see photo below) last month. It was a tad bit creepy. When I say creepy, I mean that’s where the cave crickets lived. I think they are gone now. *fingers crossed* You can catch up on why we are doing this expansion and feast your eyes on all the creepy…
Entryway Refresh and a New Front Door Window
Last month we did an entryway refresh on our home and now I’m wondering why we waited so long? That’s how it always goes. I prefer to sit with things before I write about them. It gives me some perspective on the change. It helps minimize the number of instances where I have to apologize because whatever thing we changed didn’t hold up or perform as expected. Also, it gives us time to “laugh about this later” when things go wrong and they always do with our projects. I really want to meet these people where things seem to run like clockwork for them. What’s that like? How do they…
Faux Garage Door Windows – Easy Curb Appeal Upgrade
I’m about to blow your mind with how easy it is to upgrade the look of a garage door with faux garage door windows. I know you have your skeptical eyes on right now. Good. That will make this even more impactful. What are these so-called faux windows made of and how “easy” is this DIY really? The faux garage door windows are made from magnets. If you can place a magnet on a metal surface, that’s how easy this DIY is. A toddler could do this DIY, but they’d probably put the faux garage door windows on the bottom of the door and all on the same panel like…
Stone Carriage House Gym Expansion Part 1
Last year, we made over one room in our stone Carriage House and turned it into a home gym. It took us at least six weeks of continual work to make that happen, partly because it’s a long, laborious process and partly because there are only two of us. The DIY experience is one constant reminder that you are limited by the amount of time in a day and the number of hands you possess. You’d think evolution would have fixed one of those problems by now. The Carriage House is a separate building on our property and it is divided into three parts. The entire top floor is a…
