Landscaping-Walkway and Stone Wall

BEFORE

WORKING ON SMALL STONE WALL

YOU CAN SEE WALL TAKING SHAPE

BLUE STONE WALKWAY

Transform My Home


As you can see from the before picture there really was not any landscaping to speak of, a row of 8 foot high yew hedges along the street, a 50 foot blue spruce, two overgrown rhododendrons and a lollipop shaped upright yew. The upright yew is gone in these photos and the rest will follow later. In the place where the yew was I am built a 2 foot high field stone wall that contains a planting bed. The stones are all native, meaning they come from this area. Since the wall is not really holding anything back as in a retaining wall, the stones are just dry stacked. These stones are not the easiest to work with since they come in various shapes and sizes, thus making it harder to have them tight together. It is pretty simple to use a flat stone that you just stack on top of one another, I like a challenge though. The first thing I do is run a level string line from one end to the other to ensure a level wall. You want to dig down a bit to get the first course of stones below grade and work up from there. I try to have the flattest surface of the stone facing out and then it is just a matter of picking the right stone. I like to lay all my stones out as you can see in the picture so I can  look at the wall and then choose the stone which will best fit into that space. You can always use a mason chisel and hammer to "adjust" the stone if necessary. Safety glasses are must. I then try to use any flat stones on the top as sort of a cap if you will. The front of the house is completely shade all day so the plants I chose for inside this bed are all hosta varieties. I will get into the plant material I have used later on.
The next thing I worked on was the blue stone walk. Along with the field stone wall, blue stone is very common here in Connecticut and is used widely in landscaping. Previously the walk was concrete which I jack hammered out and brought to Tilcon for recycling at no charge. The walk is about two feet wide with a random pattern of stone size so it is not so boring. Preparation is everything when putting in a walk. You need to dig down at least eight inches and remove that material if you don't want the stones to heave in the winter. I add six inches of process gravel, a base material with large and small pieces of stone, which gets packed down hard with a tamper. Then comes two inches of stone dust, a very fine crushed stone material, which is lightly packed. Of course make sure your surface is level, again I like to use a string from one end to the other as a guide. The blue stone is not going to be completely level on the bottom so that is why you don't pack the stone dust, this allows you to manipulate the stone and add or remove some stone dust to level everything. I usually jump on the stone to set it and to make sure it does not rock up and down. I leave about a half inch gap between the stone and this gets filled with stone dust. You simply pour some stone dust in the gap then I use a small blunt piece of wood to tamp in down. You will have to do this a couple times and then I spray it down with water to settle the material. After a couple day I usually notice it has settled a bit more so I add a little more stone dust. The blue stone comes in many sizes but if you do need to cut it this can be accomplished with a masonry blade installed on a circular saw. Safety glasses and a dust mask are a must. Make sure the saw you use is not your favorite because the dust will eventually destroy it!!

All the blue stone came from Sanford & Hawley in Unionville. They have a very nice selection sizes and colors. Believe it or not blue stone is not always blue, there are various shades of blues and greys. You can get it for around $6.00 per square foot.

Blue Stone Supplier

I get all my base material and stone dust from Dunning Sand & Gravel in Farmington. They have a wide assortment of stone, soil and mulch. Delivery is available.

Base Material and Stone

I hope you got something out of this and if you have any questions just ask in the comment section. Sign up to follow my blog to see me transform this old house.

My Very First Project

I must admit that in the beginning I didn't take very good photos or document things very well. One thing I would encourage is to take before and after pictures, photograph any problems you encountered and save your receipts. Once again I was a complete novice in the beginning and totally relied upon help from my good friends Krystyn and Bill Silver. At the time Krystyn worked with me at the Hill-Stead Museum and offered to help with this project. The roof had begun to leak and was in desperate need of replacement. I called on some friends and we had a weekend work party, where I fed them and provided drink in exchange for their labor for the weekend. I think it was a pretty good deal considering we needed to strip two layers of asphalt shingles and one layer of cedar shakes. The cedar shakes were original to 1910 and then two layers of asphalt shingles had been placed over them, which by the way is totally against code. You should NEVER have more than two layers of roofing on your house at one time. The project consisted of stripping all three layers, repairing the skip sheathing and adding 1/2 inch plywood. You want to use exterior grade CDX plywood. This provides a nice surface for the shingles to secure to. we installed three feet of ice and water shield along the drip edge along with new metal drip edge and rake edge. At the time architectural shingles were relatively new and double the cost of standard three tab shingles, so we went with the three tab. Architectural are pretty standard on most houses these days and give the roof more of a natural cedar shake look. If you are paying attention the ending picture of our house has the architectural shingles which we decided to install on the entire roof when we did the addition, more on that later. I highly recommend GAF brand shingles, I have used them exclusively and am very happy with the quality and performance. We also took the time to replace all the gutters on the house considering the fact that the old ones were damaged and not of the highest quality. I used Alcoa brand gutters, which in my opinion are the best. Please stay away from the big box store brand, they are of inferior quality and will not withstand the test of time. If you compare the thickness of the aluminum you will see that the Alcoa is far superior and will last a lifetime. Please visit the websites to the right of my blog to see information about GAF shingles, Alcoa gutters and Dumpsters. Don't forget the dumpster, I generally use Allied Sanitation out of Bristol. They have been the cheapest among all the possibilities. Again I wish I had taken more pictures 15 years ago but these are just a few. You will see my beautiful wife in the orange shirt. If you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comment section.

Almost The End

Summer 2008

I Thought I would give you a taste of what has happened to this little old house over the last fifteen years. It has grown in size, changed color, become more energy efficient, increased in value, added a couple surprise recreational elements and become very busy with three small children. I hope to share, in upcoming posts, how I got to this point, things I have learned along the way, materials I have used and mistakes I have made. My goal with this blog is to help people transform their homes like I have by sharing ideas, knowledge and resources. I will admit when I started work on the house I considered myself a novice DIYer and as I look back now I would have done a few things differently. I still have a lot to learn but there is so much info out there that if you have basic skills and the ability to apply that info you can do just about anything. I spent many hours on the internet doing research, reading other blogs, subscribing to home improvement forums and just sucking up as much as I could. I also called in a lot of favors from my friends who made me realize I could have never done this without them. A special thanks goes out to Krystyn and Bill Silver of Hasting-Silver Construction. They are great people and friends who helped me tremendously along the way.

In The Beginning

It all started back in 1996 when my wife and I purchased our house from my parents. This colonial style house, which I grew up in, was built in 1910 and has been in my family since around 1920. It is located on a dead end road which has approximately twenty five houses of the same time period. The land was once farm land with the original 1880 farmhouse located directly across the street from us, which unfortunately was recently resided with vinyl siding. Anyway I have great memories of living in this house growing up with my siblings, my father's expansive vegetable garden, our small above ground pool and doing home improvement projects with my dad. I guess those projects are where I obtained my desire to do this kind of work, although I am finding out now that my dad had a bunch to learn. Oh and I don't think he knew what a permit was either! As you can see the house at this point in 1996 is fairly small at 1,350 square feet with three bedrooms and one and one half baths. The outside is aluminum siding and is in desperate need of a new roof. There was no landscaping to speak of except for some overgrown hedges, upright yews and some huge rhododendrons. My dad had created a crushed stone parking spot in front of the house which was overgrown with weeds, although it did complimented the cracked and deteriorating driveway nicely. Needless to say the house needed a lot of exterior work. The interior was no better, all you had to do was picture the 1970's and you would have a good idea of what it was like. The list of "deficiencies" is endless. Linoleum floors, orange shag carpet, panneling over plaster walls, gold appliances, swirled plaster ceilings, etc. The mechanicals you ask, 30 year old forced hot air furnace, 2 huge window air conditioners, 60 amp electrical service with screw in glass fuses, 10 year old electric water heater and no insulation to speak of. Once again the interior needed a lot of work. Stay tuned for the transformation of this neglected 100 year old house which is still an ongoing project but nearing completion almost fifteen years later.