Bitten by the book meme, Neva has now passed the virus to me.  Sometime tomorrow I have to respond without an excess of snark to the following questions -- and then infect some poor and unsuspecting victims in return:

• You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
• Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
• The last book you bought was?
• The last book you read was?
• What are you currently reading?
• Five books you'd take to a deserted island?
• Who will you pass this stick (3 persons) on to, and why?

Who's been infected so far?  Anybody want to be a victim?  Let me know while I work up a response.

9:39:47 PM    comment []

Someone out there found my site while looking for the "price of cultured stone installed".

Boy, did I have a lot of questions like these when we got started on our house.

The fascia on the front porch of our house is cultured stone made by one of the best-known manufacturers (sorry, no advertising here).  It looks a lot like limestone but costs considerably less.  The job required (10) boxes of stones for the field -- all the flat stones that cover the majority of the wall space.  We needed (1) box of quoins -- pieces shaped to a corner.  The job also required a backer board, mortar and wire mesh as well as nails for mounting both the backer board and the mesh.  I made my own rough estimate of the amount needed, measuring the length and width of the entire area to be covered to arrive at square footage.  Unless you have massive windows, don't reduce for the windows since some amount of extra stone will be necessary for cutting and fitting.  Use this rough estimate for budgeting; ask your contractor/general contractor to confirm the actual amount to order.  Some stone distributors will also make this final calculation for you.

Locally, the retail price was just under $100 a box for both the field stones and the quoins.  You can do 10% to 25% better if you are working with a contractor who'll pass on his contractor's price and only charge for labor and the other materials.  It will depend a LOT on the contractor.

You'll need to allow at least two weeks for order and delivery of the stone; don't book yourself so tightly that you can't allow adequate time.

It is better to order a little more than too little, since the cultured stone comes in lots or batches.  If you have to buy one box from another lot or batch, it may not match the bulk of your installed stone.  Granted, the stuff is fairly regular in color compared to natural product, but you don't want to find yourself staring year-after-year at that one patch of too-light or too-dark stone that was ordered at the last minute when you ran out.  (Umm, yeah...that's what could have happened with the surround around my fireplace since we were using the remainder of the stone from the porch.  We bucked up and ordered new stone for the surround.)

As for the contractor:  I cannot stress this enough -- make sure to get a contractor who has installed this product many times.  DO NOT GET A BRICKLAYER who hasn't done but a few of these.  Although the product has a regular surface on the back like brick, laying this stuff is really more like laying irregular tiles.  A bricklayer is used to setting level lines and slapping highly regular bricks in place and can do so in a hurry; he may be a fine craftsman, but he won't necessarily understand this product or have the artistry it takes to lay this if he's never had any projects calling for this product.  (Yeah, been there, done this too.  The mortar joints between the stone are all far too widely spaced on my porch, look more like brick joints than the tighter stone joints.  And the guy took twice as long because he didn't "get" the product; he struggled with laying out the material because of the irregular shapes.)

We paid roughly $100 per box of installed stone for the porch; your costs may vary depending on local labor rates, the kind of cultured stone you choose and the conditions at your site.  We did not have water on site at the time of installation; I had to truck water to the site for the crew to use for making up mortar.  This cut down on overall installation time since both crew members could stay on site. 

The miscellaneous supplies like backer board, mortar, mesh are nominal, amounting to a trivial amount of the cost of the project if this is only for an accent area; mess around with estimating this only if you have to since you'll have a LOT of other things going on, assuming you are building your own home.  Ask the contractor to include it in his installation price as a separate line item -- so much easier.

Finally, pay attention to weather conditions if you are installing this outdoors.  There are temperatures and humidity levels that are optimum for installation; your contractor can explain this.  Again, don't book yourself so tightly on construction schedule that you cannot allow for this variable.  It will make a difference between a good job and a bad job, and in some cases, between getting a good contractor and a bad one.  (The good ones will refuse to do a job when they know they are being set up to fail.)

Oops, I should add one more detail on estimating and laying out the product: depending on the kind of cultured stone you are using, there may be "jumper" stones that are deeper from face to back or wider in overall width.  The more regular the stone product, the closer to estimate you'll be on purchasing.  But if your choice of cultured stone has more jumpers or is more irregular, you'll be buying more product.  Yes, more money again, but it does look pretty doggone good -- and it costs anywhere from 30% to 200% less than real stone.  I should also add that brick was about half the installed price of cultured stone -- but it's pretty banal and in this neighborhood, overused.

Good luck!

10:27:34 AM    comment []