Applying Natural Stone Veneer - Are We Stone Masons Yet??

it's been a couple weeks since we finished the prep for the stone veneer and we have had a ton of rain this summer The Masons had to move on to a different job that was less weather dependent but now we've got a little bit better weather and they're back today we're finally going to start putting some Stone on so hopefully by the end of today we'll have at least a couple pieces up that we can start seeing how it's going to come together picking up where the prep video left off we'll be adhering this Natural Stone that is qued and split into thin veneer slices we have special pieces to wrap around corners and the walls will get topped off with a natural stone ledge we hired a Mason and his helper hourly to start the first course so we could watch and get the hang of it this allowed us to help as we could to keep up the pace and work on the evenings and weekends by ourselves overall we think this saved us money on labor we were able to maintain better control of quality and we learned a new skill in the process we decided not to do the whole full parge and scratch coat and then adhering the stone that's sort of the common practice but what happens is that creates a cold joint so I've found from listening to to both these Masons and some other things that I've read online recommended that if you can if you can do basically a plying Stone as you go with with the wet mortar that's best case scenario because it's a full solid Bond there's no cold joint in between and it's a much stronger connection let's check out what's going on out here looking good got some makeshift tile spacers in that's engineering right there using what you got I love it this is our trim detail out front we'll have this this is just a mockup piece a 1x4 that will screw on with some cortex screws but we're leaving a little bit of a gap that will fill with a flexible sealant that matches the grout color and the idea is you leave the joint back enough that you can come back with grout right after the fact and being you want a white looking grout right a lighter gray yeah by the time we're done this wall will dry a lighter gray you tell me if you want that or okay that tight that'll be good yeah we maybe we could even mix just a little bit of tight s by itself up to see how that dries yeah that mud's wet and it pushes in behind that screen and makes a better suction and it's not a cold joint right we're back at it this morning working on the masonry we're working on the north wall trying to get as much of this done today as we can I'm going to go ahead and show you what the guys have gotten done this morning here's one of the corners that is pretty much complete we just have to start working on that ledge you can see the stone has a lot of gray tone but also there is some brown tones as well the guys were initially trying to keep all the stones at the same depth because the stones are varying in thickness but we decided to scrap that idea and kind of give it a more natural look by just going with the thickness of the stone as as it is and it's turning out pretty good it made make pointing the joints a little bit more challenging but we'll see how all of that goes that looks a lot nicer to work with than normal concrete this is mortar yeah the mortar looks like peanut butter the thickness of it at least I don't know if I want to eat great peanut butter don't dye it brown someone might eat it be some very interesting peanut butter let's talk about the mix ratios the mortar we used the Masons wanted to use a richer Portland cement mix to increase the tackiness and workability with the Natural Stone which isn't as easy to bond to as manufactured stone or brick the Lehi Type S mortar we used is the base of the mixture which is a premix of sand Portland cement and lime it calls for the addition of more sand at a ratio of two to three parts sand to one part Type S but the guys mix at around a 1 to one of sand in Type S with about a tri of Portland added there's a balance with mixing that always trades off strength workability and and cured brittleness so this is where some experience does help when we move on to grouting an exact mix is much more important for color purposes so we only mix within the exact guidelines on the tight Des bag yesterday in areas we knew the base coat of mortar would dry before you could get the next Stone on we used a tool to scratch it up for better adhesion after starting to put Stone on myself I was really glad we used this method rather than doing a full scratch coat I'll demonstrate why in a little bit our Stone Ledges were 2 in x 3 in to start and after mocking it up they stuck out a little too far compared to the thin Baner it both looked weird and seemed too heavy to be hanging off the wall so we decided to build a basic wooden jig to hold them and ripped 3/4 in off the back Edge Reese did most of the hard work while I measured marked and moved the pieces every once in a while you got to set that saw down oh yeah I'm sure your back's killing you it is then I started fabricating our proprietary Cutting Edge design ledge support blocks it's the end of another day of stone veneer and we got a pretty good bit done today I think mainly because Elena and I were helping the guys um I'm not sure how they felt about us helping but we got about four times the amount of square footage coverage in previous days when they work by themselves so I think it helped a little bit and we're paying these guys hourly so it's definitely helping our pocketbook to get this going but the work is looking just fine I mean we're not professional Masons but after a few Stones you kind of get the hang of it I'm finding after I kind of watch them do it the task is much less intimidating I think in any future snow vener project we're just going to do it ourselves it does help to have their tool set he's got this big husar saw which we used to trim our ledge Stones down I'll show you those up closer in a second but I would have had to buy one of those saws is like 1,500 bucks probably and it's certainly nice having some experienced guys on top when it comes to like the ratios for mixing the mortar and stuff here's the progress up close so before they had done where the mortar is light here and I think they were getting really been out of shape on the thickness of the stones they're trying to keep them all like exactly the same plane but they do vary in thickness it's a natural stone it's split at different thicknesses and so they were packing out the stones like with a lot of mortar and I basically just said listen we can't be spending you know a day to do 20 ft of stone that's just too much money so we started just basically applying it straight to the mesh and honestly it looks great I I like the variation in thickness when we do the pointing joints we're only going to point to the thickness of the lower Stone so you'll see some of the edge of these thicker stones but that's okay with me I mean I think that's going to look fine and I kind of like the variation in in the wall when it's all the same exact flatness I think kind of looks fake to be honest and it's natural stone so the idea is it looks real and natural this is what we decided on to hold the ledge Stones up at least just in place right now they're they're not mortared in yet but I ripped a 2x4 at a 5° angle on the one Edge and then just used a little piece of one by strip cut just about half inch or so wider than the stone Ledges themselves and that really holds them really nicely right at the exact spot underneath this drip cap and we'll be able to basically just mortar the back of them and set them in place and it can be left there to cure even just sitting dry they're actually quite straight and I think once we get morar behind them we'll run a string line from one to the other to do all the fine tuning and any shimming or anything that's necessary but they're nice they're sitting at that nice 5° angle for shedding water that'll look really nice when it's all said and done what are you doing struming a guitar see he's struming our ledge having these little temporary wooden Ledges is going to help us be able to to put large Stones right up underneath so we're not piecing little tiny bits of stone right underneath if we took the large Stones you know an in or so below them so I think this is going to make the final product look a lot nicer a little bit more effort putting the wooden blocks up but it'll be worth it you saw the one that a little bit narrower right this one looks a little narrow too but this is not marked as near the guys have left for the day so El and I are going to work on getting the of these up so that we can hit the ground running first thing in the morning and that way we can knock out all the ledges tomorrow to try to help with adhesion on these ledge Stones we're also scoring the back I'm just using my angle grinder and putting like an E8 in deep score at an angle every few inches not sure how much it's going to really help but it's a nice smooth like saw cut face on the backs of these it doesn't seem like it's going to bond that well to this Natural Stone so any amount of surface texture or roughing the surface up I think is going to help that's why we're scoring it with the angle [Music] [Applause] grinder that thing is a beast I've never run one of these saws before but it spins that blade up so fast it feels like a gyroscope like it's like trying to like slowly turn this thing because of how heavy and fast that blade spinning but it goes through this Stone like nothing we're going to try to heat treat these somehow looks got a look little burn mark on it probably wouldn't have done that if I used water but the saw cut Edge is kind of ugly just cuz it's so flat and smooth to match the rest of the finish I know they take like a big propane blowtorch and sort of burn off all the surface of the cut stone and so I'm going to try to do something similar here I'm not sure how well it's going to work I'm going to test it on one of these scraps first to see if it does work but that is how we're going to try to like make this look good again this morning we're getting started on the ledges actually getting them all mored in and Str a string line all the way down to that end to help us get all the corners lined up nice and straight kind of hard to tell on camera but it's looking pretty darn good hopefully we can get all the ledges wrapped up by lunch time or so and then we can start getting Stone up to it we want to get some Stones kind of supporting up underneath the ledge before we take these blocks out because it is quite a quite a heavy piece of stone on not a whole lot of surface area so being able to support it with some Stone from underneath will help it from sagging where needed we're just throwing some shims in just to get this nice and straight mocked up the corners here and because these are both beveled at 5° the corner joints aren't precisely uh straight so what we're going to do is before we go ahead and point this we'll just take the angle grinder and run it in to shave off these bottom edges so this is a nice Plum looking joint and it will be perfect for the corner this little propane bottle torch just did not have the power to scale the surface of the stone so we had to ditch this idea I don't have the Brick Layers technique down yet putting Mas you'll get it it's hard it took me 66 years there is that how old you are 66 yeah oh my gosh I hope to be going as hard as you at 66 I'm going to live to be 120 so yep you're just halfway there Mark's only 35 I know he's aged well what's your secret Mark plenty of cigarettes and coffee yeah back I got the [Applause] string okay drop your line that back in where it needs to be get it after we have it parged behind where the ledges are going to go and get a half or three thick of mud on the the back of the ledge we'll stick it in here inch and a half or so is what it should be sticking out from the flashing on the long stretches we put strings to make that easy to do we didn't have to measure everyone but this little Standalone piece between our garage doors can easily measure and I'm sticking my twoot level on making sure it's nice and level then I'm going to be sort of going side to side and I'm looking for squeeze out do one last little sanity check to make sure we're about even on each side good enough for government work that sun definitely sets this stuff up quick Now The Breeze is picking up too it's even it's double whammy bottom Edge I would not be doing that's it that made me so nervous I'm like ah [Applause] you're the end of another day we got a pretty good amount done today I'm happy with it I didn't get a ton of film because I was helping do all the stone work today as well but you can see we've gotten this whole wall basically done except for where all of the little blocks are holding up the ledge we got all the ledges on this morning too before lunch which is awesome that was a big hurdle to get through those Ledges and that created basically our picture frame that we now have to fill in the challenging part with the ledges is it is quite a heavy piece of stone and and we have to be careful about when we can take our little support blocks off so our idea was to run Stone up to at least some portion of each one of the 3ft ledge pieces and then pack some mortar in a above that stone or at least put a shim or something in there and then we can pull this off and fill in with the rest of the stone and then once we put the pointing in or the mortar in between all the stones kind of like the grout it should be good to go from there these turned out nice and straight using the string definitely helped we you know threw some shims in here as needed just to raise it up little bits and pieces these were not mounted like any special way we basically just held it up and screwed this in so sometimes they were a little bit off so in order to keep the stones even you know some needed shims we kept the joints probably about quarter to 38 of an inch each that should be plenty to get some Mor in there Bree and Mark did this whole section which looks good and then I basically did this whole section which I think still looks pretty good for uh basically a complete amateur doing all this there are definitely some nuances and tricks to stone masonry but with this Mosaic stuff really the best trick you can have is being being good at puzzles because that's essentially what this feels like fitting together a giant homemade jigsaw puzzle and making it look good so every now and then I'll kind of just like stand back look at the wall make sure we don't have too many tiny pieces and too many big pieces in the same area I'm sure there's other technical ways to make stone veneer look good but a lot of it's just making the stones fit today is Friday and the guys are not going to be working this weekend and it's actually a holiday weekend Labor Day weekend so they're not coming back till Tuesday I'm going to be working on this hard myself all weekend maybe I'll get Atlanta to come help a little bit if I'm lucky but I am going to try to get this whole front side done so it's these three little mini pillars in the front and then finish up the side that we're almost done with take off the support blocks and infill everything underneath of them I want to let these Ledges cure for at least a full day so we got them on by like noon today I don't want to take any off really tomorrow if I don't have to there's still tons of work to be done before having to take any of these off so it'll probably be Sunday before I remove any any of the blocks but even when I do I'll make sure I have a stone up underneath of it that I can shim because I don't want this thing sagging or breaking off although when I feel like the mortar underneath we we put a fillet joint on each one of these underneath to kind of like help create a little shelf to support it and it feels pretty darn solid so my hopes are high that these will do well but time will tell so it's just me today and my goal is to get most of that front elevation done it's three small pillars and one of them wraps around a corner the these are I think harder than the larger wall areas because you're in such a small constraint and you're trying to make these Mosaic Stones fit I'm starting off by picking out my Stones I've got them all sort of laid out I want the thickest and nicest Stones up front and we want ones that have a little bit of brown tones as well because this Stone was supposed to be a kind of a mix of gray and brown but really it's mostly gray now that we're looking at it so there is some brown I'm trying to find those and then I'll put them all out front so I know exactly what set of stones I can choose from when laying that Mosaic out Alena helped me lay this pallet out and the strategy was like long skinny rectangles sort of here some larger stuff here and then medium to small stuff up in the top one thing I also need to keep in mind is we have a lot of straight edges in these little squares up front so I need stones with straight edges to at least get close to the jams that's a [Music] beauty I'm basically all prepped out front with stone but it's sunny out there now and I really don't want to sit in the Sun and work and also it dries out the mortar really quickly so I'm back on the back side and I decided I'm going to just work back here until the sun moves over here and then I'll go out front and finish that up but I got a few pieces up just with one small batch of mortar and I wanted talk about the mortar real quick that we're mixing up we basically have four main ingredients in this mix the first and primary being Lehi Type S masonry cement that contains Portland cement sand and lime and it's kind of a pre-blended mix but the Masons also wanted to add another ingredient which is just straight Portland cement it makes the Mix A Lot tackier and stickier they also claim that it makes it more resistant to water getting behind the stones regular Masonry sand is the third major ingredient and then this water is the fourth and for the mix to to stick these stones on the wall we're going a little bit thinner than say like peanut butter just enough to barely stick on the TR but not too thick that it's tough to tr out onto the wall the application technique of sort of scratch coating as we go or more like applying it like tile is definitely a little bit non-traditional but the Masons have also said they've seen a lot of failures and almost always it's because of improper bonding between a scratch coat and the glob of mortar behind the stone when it tries to stick to the scratch coat they claim that this is going to be a much more robust solution I'm not 100% sure cuz I really don't know but I feel like they're probably right because of just the fact of no cold joint between the stone and then the wire match which is the true foundation for what the stone is hanging off [Music] of the sun is finally moved moved over to the other side but before I get too busy on the Shaded side here I want to get this massive Corner block on here I found that doing all the corners and the jams are really the way to go because it gives you the true frame that you have to work within in these small sections and that's important if we're trying to get large stones in here to support this ledge so getting this corner piece in is kind of critical to doing the rest that's all in the shade let's go ahead and do [Music] that quick note on Fastener spacing for our wire mesh most guidance I've seen says 6 in everywhere like a grid of 6 in I have these number 10 by 2 and 1/2 in screws going into studs I wanted to make sure I was fastening the studs I just was trying to minimize my holes into the WRB the weather resistant barrier which in this case is our ZIP sheathing but there are places that I think could use a little bit more fastening especially in these little pillars where we don't have that many studs and we going to be hanging some pretty big Stones like right here in those cases I'm just going to take some galvanized roofing nails and put those in in general I didn't really want to put them 6 in everywhere it just felt like a heck of a lot of holes and once all of these stones are sort of on here and grouted together and acting as kind of a wall I really don't see that being heavy enough to like pull these big screws and washers out of the studs it's just a heck of a lot of weight and I also can't imagine it would like Shear the heads off either especially cuz these are stainless and they're not going to corrode but that is just one quick note I think if you're doing kind of the standard application electr galvanized or hot dip galvanized roofing nails everywhere put them 6 in everywhere but in our case with the stainless screws and washers I'm being a little bit less liberal with the fastening to try to keep the holes in the WRB at a minimum our little Stone picker has se oh and she's got Dorito snacks great she's eating on the job she has selected did the next Stone which is going to be that guy and we're going to put that right up underneath the ledge I think I'm going to break my rule of doing all the jams first because that is a beauty of a stone it's got some brown in it which we like up front and we need some support under this ledge before we take these blocks out so we're going to basically set that right here we don't have really hardly anything except for just the corner of that supporting underneath of it I'm going to take a stick to support the other end down from this guy and we're going to get that it's kind of like the Keystone almost to the front center of our facade so we want to make sure we get that right all right it's the moment of truth to take these two out so we can get a long block underneath our ledge so put that clamp on the left side there and I'm screwing a block onto our temporary Jam here kind of accomplished the same thing give this LGE a little bit support I'm not even sure if it needs this to be honest I'm going to take the precaution anyway cuz if this breaks off we're in trouble oh no you scared me did I scare you now you scare me just to make sure I like it just to make sure she likes it I'm going to hold it up oh yeah I think that's good she thinks it's good she likes it she approves do it cutting a right angle on her I found the easiest way to cut these Stones is a 4-in blade on this angle grinder the key though is not leaving a saw cut visible after you've grouted it because saw cuts just look ugly on this Natural Stone which has no completely straight edges so what I'm doing is cutting from the back like 3/4 the way through basically scoring it and then taking a hammer and that last quarter of the thickness just chipping it so it breaks naturally and it leaves sort of a jagged edge but it's right along the line that you want it to be let me show you what I'm talking about this guy needs to be a right angle to fit underneath the ledge and go up against the door jam I'm going to cut just this little sliver off here but I'm going to mark it from the back side and score on the back side I later learned that I was hammering the wrong direction on the stone which is what caused the chip out on the front it's a lot better if you flip it the other way did take the front edge of this off a little bit it still looks like a Natural Stone Edge which is what the goal was when we get our pointing joints in you won't be able to tell that this was actually a saw cut Edge looks nice and natural that was a good day of work yesterday got quite a bit of the front up we're going to finish that now that this is finally coming into the shade today it's definitely a scorching hot day out today so do not want to be working in the sun if at all possible so I'm over here around the side starting to take these mounts off here we've had a couple days of cure time on The Ledges so I feel pretty good about taking them off the ones that had mortar packed underneath with a stone directly beneath them this is getting tricky though because these are pretty small areas to fill and so I'm really having to get creative in either finding the right stones or cutting a custom Stone so I find that cutting seems to yield the best results here's kind of my technique in a spot like this where we already have a bunch of tiny Stones I don't want to infill with more tiny Stones so instead I'm going to cut a t-shaped stone to sort of fit that and I'm using this guy right here a cardboard template that I cut out to mock up exactly where I need a stone and then finding a decent stone that will fit that that I can cut out if I can find a stone that's roughly the same like General size and height like that one's almost exactly the right height with close to some of the same features maybe I can even get those angles to line up a little bit better all I really need to do is cut out that and do this kind of jagged cut up the side and that stone should fit where I need it to fit there she is it fits and I actually screwed this one up though because I didn't mark which side of the te was the front so I actually did all the saw cuts from the front and that is not what you want you do not want to see this exposed either way way when I hit the thing it pretty much broke clean through this is not a great example but this Jagged Edge is supposed to be what's exposed it was supposed to be like that instead it's like this so the sharper straighter cleaner cuts are what's going to be exposed we're going to put a pointing joint right up to this and we can try to disguise it a little bit but ideally you don't want these smooth straight lines when we're doing Natural Stone cuz everything else is Jagged that was a mistake on my part but I will definitely remember that for the future to Mark the front I don't think it looks that bad I don't think it's worth redoing this over but just something to learn going forward even though this is kind of a non-traditional method of doing stone veneer not doing the scratch coat first I am really happy now that I'm putting some of these up myself that we're doing it this way because I can actually feel the difference in adhesion of the wet joint versus the dry cold joint this parge just completely sucks the water out of this stuff in like 2 seconds like check that out imagine there's a stone on that and within seconds that scratch coat has sucked the moisture out of this now look it's it's it scrapes off like dust and you can see how much water it's sucked out of there in the meantime now that's why the stone sticks so well initially to that scratch coat but there's been a couple where I've had to do a slight adjustment to the position of it within 10 or 15 seconds of sticking it and the stone just Falls right off because there's no real Bond at that point and when I try to make the same adjustment on something that's on just wet mortar Tred right onto the wire mesh first of all it slides around but if I ever try to pull it off it is like pulling a suction cup off this wall I mean it does not want to come off and I can only imagine that once it dries it's even more stuck on there the Masons have even talked about how they've seen applications with the standard scratch and stick method and they sometimes will only go maybe 5 10 years before their Stones popping off because of freeze thaw Cycles cuz water gets in between the scratch coat and the stick coat freeze thaw freeze thaw and then all of a sudden it pops to Stone free of the rest of them that's obviously worst case scenario but I feel like this method is a little bit more robust the mic died but I said even if it does take a little bit more time it's a new day and we're getting it done this afternoon we finished up all of the gaps above this wall so there's just a couple more little slivers to do there I think I'm about to do a cardboard template for the corner piece here Atlant will find me a little square for that guy in the meantime I have her disassembling all the little ledge supports cuz we don't waste screws around here nope one of those buckets of screws is like 35 bucks not throwing those babies away for some of these tricky areas the cardboard template method really cannot be beat like this corner is not only wrapping a corner but there's like some weird angles involved I'll make the right piece out of cardboard and then I can easily Mark the corner to be cut stone veneer is kind of nice because it's not like Tile For example which relies on in insane amounts of precision and accuracy stone veneer is a little bit more art you're qu inch half inch off you can pretty much get away with it honestly you say that before pointing and there's my stone now I should be able to snap it yeah I only had to saw cut that little bit ah wait oh we're good oh it did break it it broke this off what I didn't mean to do that what did it break oh wait no no didn't it it's that's where you cut you cut it an angle that already broke maybe it just fell off the table and I thought it broke false Al why don't you set it down and no because I'm supposed to go the other way remember it's how you get it to not fracture all the face off that go is going this way okay why don't you set it down though no because holding it absorbs the impact so that it doesn't accidentally chip that off now I broke it see that wasn't supposed to happen yeah I got I got what I wanted to break off I think you needed to cut deeper you still had about half the stone darn that's a bummer check out this cool spider I'm not sure what kind of spider that is but it's got a lot of really cool coloring second time for charm round two went better this one's good because I don't need a spacer over there I was going to have to fill that so I'm actually happy that was a happy accident as Bob R says stop as we're taking our braces out I decided a good idea would be to plug the hole from the screwer with a little roofing nail look good don't you think yeah a little bit of white yeah I like the white I think I need to hold it up kind of like this and just pack I don't really like this one cuz it's like pack the mortar behind maybe C shape weirdly comes out too far here it's not sticking out over the ledge I was proud that Elena picked up the templating technique really easily I think it tapped into her past artistic background for sculpture the one downfall of the templating technique though is it's easy to get 2% with it and you end up cutting the stone too tight and you don't have enough joint room for getting grout in between the [Music] [Music] stones we're down to the last Stone which Bree just cut it's 145 in the afternoon and it is hot and check out our extremely expensive tent some 2x4s clamped in the bucket with a little tarp over it trying to keep us somewhat cool it's like 91° out here right now but we are going to have some Stone left over too which is cool maybe about 10 20 square ft maybe you can do a little H porch paer or something like that with what we have left who knows we we'll figure it out Bree is working on that one but I lied this is going to be the very last Stone still got a trimmer down but boom something just like that

Channel: Mason Dixon Acres

Views: 17,333

Keywords: building, stone veneer

Id: dV8msqbm4Ow

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023