The Owner Builder S Guide To Stone Masonry

From simple stone walls to elaborate homes and studios, this is the ideal book for any DIY builder interested in working with stone. Thanks to its utility and cost-effectiveness, stone is an ideal construction resource for the astute owner-builder. Cheap and readily available, rock can be gathered from streambeds, abandoned quarries, and open fields with relative ease. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a natural landscape devoid of building stone. In this book, beloved home-building expert Ken Kern teams up with fellow stone masons Steve Magers and Lou Penfield to present the ultimate guide to DIY stone masonry. THE OWNER-BUILDER'S GUIDE TO STONE MASONRY is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of building with stone. Everything from detailed information on sourcing, sorting, and selecting stones, to the various methods of building with stone. There are even chapters on building fireplaces, steps, floors, and arches.

Many Americans dream about building their own home. With this book you can make those dreams a reality. As innovative and original as it was when first published in 1972, Ken Kern's "The Owner-Built Home" is an aspiring DIY homebuilder's bible. Finally, after years of demand, it is back in print for the next generation of owner-builders. The product of years of research and experimentation with innumerable design and construction techniques around the world, "The Owner-Built Home" is full of practical tips. It describes in refreshing, straight-forward language, everything involved in making a home. Fully illustrated with drawings, photographs, and plans, "The Owner-Built Home" is an indispensable tool for anyone planning to build a house.

Have you ever dreamed of building or at least living in a beautiful stone house? For more than five years Stonefield Publishing's Stone House: A Guide to Self-Building with Slipforms has been the prime source for information on a unique method of stone masonry that affords everyone, regardless of their level of building experience, the opportunity to create walls and even homes of stone. "The technique has been around for a long time," says author Tomm Stanley, "but it's not that well known. Add to that the mystique that surrounds the traditional craft of stonemasonry and there's no wonder that stone houses are not all that common, even in areas where stone is abundant". The book has now been revised and is being re-released with two new chapters, digital enhancement to the original images and new photographs. Stonefield Publishing's Marketing Manager Brad Andersen notes, "We've received a lot of great feedback from readers over the years but one consistent issue was the image quality. We took those comments to heart and with technology that wasn't available to us back in 2003 have just brought the photos to life". Tomm says that writing the new chapters and preparing the revised edition for print allowed him to finally complete his original vision of the book. "One of the new chapters, called Reflections, could only have been written after the passage of time. It's about looking back and thinking about what could have been done differently, what worked very well and also speculating on potential targets for future alteration. It really finished the story for me and makes it more complete for readers." Stone House focuses on the story of Tomm Stanley's own experience of building his house with the slipform method. This book is certainly not your average "how-to" offering; it is more like a tapestry of information and entertainment interwoven with technical advice, diagrams and pictures, tales of the owner builder experience and as the title implies, plenty of guidance on how to build your own stone house using the slipform method of construction. It makes great reading for those that are on the way to becoming self-builders as well as the rest of us that dream of such adventures.

Taunton's Best of Fine Homebuilding series collects and organizes the most useful articles from FINE HOMEBUILDING magazine by subject. Each book is filled with step-by-step articles written by professional builders who share their expertise to help readers achieve quality results. Here 31 articles by master masons explain the best ways to build with brick, stone, and mortar from stone walls to flagstone to fireplaces and chimneys.

The house of your Dreams does not have to be expensive. The key is all in the planning. How much a house costs, how it looks, how comfortable it is, how energy-efficient it is--all these things occur on paper before you pick up even one tool. A little extra time in the planning process can save you tens of thousands of dollars in construction and maintenance. That is time well spent! Living Homes takes you through the planning process to design an energy and resource efficient home that won't break the bank. Then, from the footings on up to the roof, author Thomas J. Elpel guides you through the nuts and bolts of construction for slipform stone masonry, tilt-up stone walls, log home construction, building with strawbales, making your own terra tile floors, windows and doors, solar water systems, masonry heaters, framing, plumbing, greywater, septic systems, swamp filters, concrete-fly ash countertops, painting and more. Living Homes was completely re-organized and revised for the new sixth edition, based on five additional years of building experience with low-cost, high efficiency construction methods. Get the latest ideas on how to build a high-performance house that will stand the test of time! The sixth edition includes fifteen pages of new material covering the latest stone masonry tips, plus revised and expanded tips and techniques throughout the book.

Author Ian Cramb was a fifth-generation stonemason who relied on traditional methods to create and restore beautiful stone structures. In this do-it-yourself manual for homeowners, masonry contractors, and restoration specialists, Cramb drew on his fifty years of life experience in the craft to cover restoration techniques for historic structures in the U.S. and Britain. The book covers various types of stone, stone-cutting, and traditional mortar mixes for walls, foundations, and buildings.