The most common question I receive from fellow owners of old homes is where to buy lime to mix lime mortar to repoint a historic stone foundation. They know it’s bad to use Portland cement on a stone foundation, and the appropriate lime is hard to find! So, I compiled a directory of where to buy natural hydraulic lime (NHL) in the United States. It’s a short directory because we get what we get, but it is separated by U.S. region. Don’t completely discount a supplier or brand of NHL if they aren’t in your region; they may have distributors closer to you.  I’ve also included which NHL suppliers offer…

I recently used AI to hire a contractor, or rather, help me hire a contractor, and that’s the kind of assistance I could used to. Finding a good contractor – any contractor, really – is so hard. One unfortunate universal human experience seems to be that homeowners have a hard time finding and hiring good contractors. We all have stories. Ugh. So. Many. Stories. I needed to hire a painter to paint the trim along our roofline. It was a small job square footage-wise and it was all 30-feet in the air. Plus, there might be some rot to deal with. “Super fun,” said no one. I had been ghosted…

Did you know gable returns are a defining feature of Greek Revival-style architecture in the United States? We recently repaired a gable return on our Greek Revival, which ended up being a doozy of a project, so we’ve gotten an up close and personal look at this stylistic architectural feature. While not universal, gable returns are commonly found on Greek Revival-style homes built in the United States between 1830 and 1860. Gable returns or eave returns, as they are sometimes called, are an extension of the roof trim or cornice that turn the corner at the bottom of the gable. They are purely decorative for homes built in the U.S.,…

Today is the big TADA! This is the finale of our Basement Workshop Repointing Project series and the grand reveal of how the finished space turned out! I’m using a lot of exclamation points because I’m very happy that we’ve checked another project off the list. Sure, I added ten more projects to the list in the time it took us to finish this one, but that’s the “perk” of homeownership! Why We Were Repointing Our Stone Foundation If you’re new here (welcome!), we’ve been repointing the stone foundation in our basement workshop, which is the oldest section of our house dating back to the 1780s. If you’re keeping track,…

Our Basement Workshop Repointing Series continues today with a drastic before and after. We took a poorly constructed doorway that had been heavily patched with concrete and turned it into a stone doorway that steals the show. Here’s how the doorway looked before we got our hands on it, and before we realized just how bad a shape it was in. That’s not so bad, you say. You’re right. It was worse. And not just because it looked like a toddler had fingerpainted mortar on the wall. That concrete, which was used to secure the opening in the wall when a new addition was added, was hiding missing rocks and…

Welcome to another installment in our riveting Basement Workshop Repointing series. This is part 6, where we leave repointing in the mortar tub and move straight into building a new foundation wall. It’s technically the extension of an existing wall, but we are building it from scratch. Coming up with blog post titles, especially ones that appease the search engine gods, is harder than repointing a stone foundation. But I digress. Why Do We Need to Extend the Foundation Wall? At some point in the past, an opening was created in this foundation wall to access the foundation under our kitchen addition. It’s a rather large opening, approximately 4 feet across.…

Welcome back to another installment of our Basement Workshop Stone Repointing series. This is part 5 because I really know how to milk a series for all it is worth. Today, we’re talking about the tops of foundation walls. An old house’s stone foundation wall is usually at least 18 inches thick. Besides the fact that this wall is supporting the weight of the house, there are also multiple beams sitting on top of the foundation wall. These may include the sill plate, floor joists, and door and window headers. From the outside of the house, the top of your foundation wall is not visible. Or, if it is, there’s…

Welcome back to our Basement Workshop Stone Repointing series. This is part 4, where I tell you how our floor joists have taken a starring role in this melodrama. Anatomy of an Old House Way back in the 1780s, when this house was built. It was a humble one-room structure with a sleeping loft. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know this room as our dining room with the big fireplace. The sleeping loft is now our office. This humble house, of course, had a stone foundation, which is the basement workshop that we are repointing now. We don’t know where this basement area was accessed,…