Stone & Foundations

I sell lime mortar out of a small yard, which means I spend a lot of time talking people out of buying it for the wrong job and into buying it for the right one. The job it is most often wrong for is a modern block wall. The job it is almost always right […]

Under most of the pre-1900 houses in Fair Haven there is a wall of gneiss and granite fieldstone, laid dry or in a weak lime mortar, sitting directly on the ground. No footing, no damp-proof course, no drainage. They have held up houses for 150 years, and they alarm every home inspector who sees one

The brownstone steps and window surrounds around Wooster Square fail in a way that looks almost geological, because it is. Sheets come away parallel to the face, a quarter inch to two inches thick, taking the tooled surface with them and leaving a soft, sandy interior exposed to the weather. The stone is layered, and

A Huntington client sent me photos of the three-season room a previous contractor had built for her: a nice job, sitting on a slab poured on grade, with a two-inch step now opening between the room and the house. Nothing about the room was wrong. It had simply been built on something that moves in

The Hyde Park bungalows with limestone bases have a tell I look for on every survey: a hairline running vertically through three or four courses, always somewhere near the middle of a long run, always tighter in the morning than in the afternoon. That is not settlement. That is a wall with nowhere to expand.