Brick, Stone and Block Work

Why is one stone bid so much lower than another?

Because the cheapest way to install stone is to leave part of the job out, and most people cannot tell that is what happened. The most common by far is joints that were never packed with full mortar. On a mortared wall that joint is not decoration - it locks the stones to the wall behind and keeps water out. Fill it partway and the wall still looks finished the day it is done, which is the whole problem. Then winter comes, and it does not take years. One freeze-thaw cycle can start stones popping off. Ask what goes in the joints, ask how deep the base is, and be careful of anybody who does not want to talk about the parts you cannot see.

Stones are coming off my house and it is only a few years old. Why?

I see this constantly, and nearly always on stacked stone. Water gets in behind the stone, freezes, and pushes it off the wall. Go along the wall and tap the stones. A bonded stone sounds solid; a loose one sounds hollow, and sometimes it moves. On a house under five years old I have found as much as eighty percent of the stone loose that way, with only two or three actually on the ground. It usually comes down to what went on behind it, or what did not.

What is supposed to go behind stone before it is set?

Three things, and you cannot check any of them once the wall is up. A scratch coat, which is the mortar surface between the wall and the stone, keyed so the next coat has something to grab. The back of every stone buttered before it is set. And about half an inch of mortar between the stone and that scratch coat. Miss one and you get a wall that looks finished and is not. Ask about all three before you hire. A mason doing it right will be glad to tell you, because it is exactly what he is being underbid on.

Is stacked stone a good idea in Idaho?

Indoors, yes, and it looks terrific - a stacked stone fireplace never sees weather and I will build you one all day. Outdoors I will try to talk you out of it. Stacked stone has no mortar in the joints, and there is no keeping water out of them. Wind-driven rain fills them from every direction, it freezes, and stones start coming off. Some masons will tell you it is fine as long as you install it right. I do not believe there is a right, not outdoors and not in this climate. If you want the look anyway, that is your call and I will build it. I will just make sure you know what you are buying first. That is a good part of what you are paying a professional for.

Are some stones a poor choice for outdoor masonry?

Yes, and two of them turn up around here a lot. Both come down to the same thing: mortar does not glue stone onto a wall, it keys into it, and it wants a rough, absorbent face to grip.

Natural river rock does not give it one. Water tumbled it smooth over a few thousand years and it barely absorbs anything, so the bond is weak before you start. Then the geometry works against you, and this is the part most people have never had explained. The face of a river rock is convex, so the only place a mortar joint would fully capture the stone is at its apex, the widest point of the curve. That apex is a line with no width to it. You cannot land a joint on it, not on one stone and certainly not across a wall of them, because every stone bulges differently. So in practice every joint finishes either short of the apex or past it, and both are failures.

Short of it, the mortar is bearing against the underside of a curve. Nothing is capturing the stone. There is no mechanical lock at all, so the stone is hanging on by grip alone, on a face that gives the mortar almost nothing to grip. Past it, the mortar has to feather down over the curve to a knife edge, and a feathered edge is the first thing to fail in a freeze-thaw cycle. It cracks, water gets in behind the stone, and the failure works its way along the joint from there.

Oakley stone is a bonding problem too. It is a dense Idaho quartzite, and dense means it does not absorb, so there is very little for the mortar to pull into. What I find is not chips off the face. It is whole stones on the ground.

Manufactured river rock is a different product and not the same conversation. It is a thin veneer with a back made to bond, and it does the job.

Do you do brick and stone work in Boise and Nampa?

Yes. Our service area is all of Southern Idaho, between the Oregon and Wyoming borders. That reaches as far north as McCall, Stanley, New Meadows and Salmon. I work from Nampa in the Treasure Valley and Blackfoot in eastern Idaho. Fackrell Masonry and Construction has been an Idaho masonry family since 1971. Start with the quote form at https://fmandc.com/intake/.

Can stone veneer replace stucco on the front of a house?

Yes, and it is regular work. The stucco comes off first. All of it, down to the substrate, and that is how it gets done every time. Installing over an existing finish is never good practice, whatever anybody tells you, because the new work then depends on a surface that was never meant to carry it. What is behind the stucco decides how a particular house gets approached, so that gets looked at on site.

Do you work with engineered stone?

Yes, regularly. The outdoor kitchen and bar were faced in engineered stone, and so was a full-height chimney chase on a log home out in the pines - that one with mortar in the joints, not dry-stacked. Engineered stone is a manufactured product, so the sizes and the colour range are consistent, which makes it a good fit where you want a particular look repeated across a big face.

Do you build garden and fence walls?

Yes. Cut sandstone fence walls go up on a poured footing with rebar through the cores, block after block set by hand. One of ours runs the length of a property line. At the driveway end there is a capped sandstone pillar, built on a concrete block core and faced in the same stone. We hand-dug that footing to stay off the neighbor's lawn. Good fences make good neighbors, as the customer put it.

Can you do brick inside the house, not just outside?

Yes. We faced a plain painted kitchen wall in pale brick above the wood wainscot, with the mortar washed over the joints. It runs up to the ceiling and around the corner past the door. Then it carries on down the open stairwell, so it does not stop dead at the floor line. Same room, same wainscot. The wall is the part that changed.