Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 6, How To Remove A Stone Wall

How do you remove a stone wall? The same way you build one. One stone at a time.

That was not intended to be a glib response. That’s the short answer.

If you want to know the specifics of taking down a stone wall, including how fun the process is, you came to the right place.

The fun part is easy to answer. It’s not. I’m sure there are worse tasks though. It’s best not to think about it or wonder how long it will take. Find that happy place in your mind and get to work.

As to the specifics of how we took down a stone wall, I can tell you we did not come in with a wrecking ball.

This was a slightly more delicate job.

Keep in mind that the stone wall we removed was 18 inches thick and comprised of fieldstone and lime mortar with a bit of concrete thrown in to keep us swearing. I’ll also add a disclaimer because this is the world we live in. We are not experts, your building code official, or the better angel resting on your shoulder. We are simply DIYers sharing our experience and trying our best with the information we have at the time.

Tools you may need to remove a stone wall:

hammer drill with chisel attachment or other chiseling tool
work gloves
mask
eye protection
sturdy shoes
shovel
wheelbarrow
step ladder

An endless well of mental grit is also helpful.

Our process for taking down a stone wall:

We used our hammer drill and its handy-dandy chisel attachment to remove the stone wall. There are other tools, maybe better ones, that do chisel work, but the hammer drill is what we have in our toolbox.

This goes without saying, but for safety’s sake, always start at the top when removing a stone wall and work your way down to the ground. You don’t want to play a game of chicken with gravity because you might end up at the bottom of the rock pile if you do. Always start from the top.

We planned to reuse the stones we removed from the wall, so we separated our debris. Stones were stacked on the property to be reused. Mortar was chunked up to be disposed of.

How did we know the stone wall wasn’t structural?

Most stone walls are structural, so you should not proceed with removing one until you’ve had all the experts and maybe even your grandma assess the issue. If you get the okay after doing your due diligence, you should still think twice before you proceed. Demoing a stone wall takes time and is hard, hard work. You don’t want your grandma saying, “I told you so.”

We knew the stone wall we wanted to remove wasn’t structural because it wasn’t touching anything above it. It wasn’t holding up a beam or joist. Nothing was resting on it. It wasn’t bearing any weight. We could stick our head up there and see the room on the other side of the wall. In addition, the mortar on top of the wall was smoothed completely flat, meaning this was done on purpose. It was basically an overbuilt room divider.

If the wall WAS structural, what could be done if we wanted to open up the wall?

Again, with the assessment of experts, it might be feasible to create a doorway or opening in a stone wall that is load bearing.

The functionality of basements with stone foundations are a good example of this.

Every time our house was added onto after the 1700s, a new stone foundation was built. To connect the various parts of the basement, openings or doorways were added. The builders removed enough rocks for the opening, then created a doorway header out of thick planks or beams. This door header then helped bear the load above it.

Ignore the pipe placement in the below photo, which isn’t great, and focus on how the doorway is constructed.

How hard is this job really? 

My husband easily spent 25 hours taking down a 9 foot long, 8.5 foot high, 18 inch thick stone wall. I spent another 5 or so hours moving rocks and debris.

There was a 3×3 foot chunk of solid concrete in this wall, near the floor, that was really hard to remove. We even tried swinging a sledgehammer at it, but that didn’t help. That spot took many more hours than we anticipated to remove. If we didn’t have that concrete chunk, we might have gotten it all down in around 15 hours or so.

We had repointed the other side of this wall 9 months prior, so we were undoing a bunch of our work by demoing the stone wall. One thing that made us feel good though was that the new lime mortar (NHL5) we installed 9 months ago was SO much harder to remove than the mortar that was 100 years (or more) old.

It means that we really have been doing the right thing by repointing all the walls in this building. They are much stronger now than they were before we started.

Have you been wondering why we wanted to remove this stone wall? 

We didn’t realize how much we’d enjoy using the home gym we built on the other side of this stone wall last year, and decided we wanted to expand it to make it more functional.

Since this building is very narrow – approximately 9 feet wide inside – it doesn’t leave us much room to maneuver around gym equipment.

This half of the building needed to be restored anyway, so why not make it a much more useable space for now and in the future?

This is the moment (see below) when we realized how big the space was going to feel when we were done. We’re essentially doubling the gym size.

As a reminder, here’s how the wall started.

Here’s how it looks now!

TADA!

Oh, did you think we would remove a stone wall and that would be the end of it?

Hahahahahaha.

I wish.

The stone wall was connected to the walls on either end of it with interlocking rocks, so we’ll have to rebuild portions of the remaining walls. This isn’t a big deal as this project has already had plenty of that.

We will also have to fix the floor as there was only dirt under the portion of the floor that we removed.

Come back soon and I should have another building update for you.

Heck, I might even take down that plastic for the next blog post. Ha!

What do you think of the change? Were we nuts for removing this stone wall? You can always comment on this blog post, email me here, or reach out via Instagram or Facebook. I respond to all of your comments.

Happy DIYing. Stay Safe.

Thanks for hanging out with me today! Here are some other blog posts in this series that you may enjoy reading.

Stone Carriage House Gym Expansion: Part 1

Stone Carriage House Gym Expansion: Part 2, DEMO

Stone Carriage House Gym Expansion: Part 3, Old Windows

Stone Carriage House Gym Expansion: Part 3, Old Pipes