The temptation is strong to build a retaining wall whenever we have a bounty of nice stone. We gave in to that temptation on this project.

I’d like to point out a couple of things here in this photo…

Have you noticed that the angled pitch of the shoulders of a chimney always matches the pitch of the roof above it?

Well, at least that’s the way they have been done historically… but I’ve seen many new homes completely ignore this little detail.

Also notice the salvaged limestone rocks that we have used to build this chimney. Limestone comes out the ground black in color but quickly develops a patina of light grey.

The process of salvaging and shaping this recycled stone has exposed some of that blackness… which disappeared in just a couple of years.

We once restored an old farmhouse over in the Shenandoah Valley near Harrisonburg.

Among other details… we put a red roof on her.

My windowsill… this photo was taken last July.

That’s fake snow on the window, and a fake evergreen branch, and a fake tree outside with fake snow on it.

Oh those sales catalogs… is nothing real in them?

It’s a man thing.

We made use of the old attic stairway for use to get to the second floor of the shop.

Barely two feet wide and steeply pitched this original piece to the house took very little square footage out of the shop and since it was seldom used it fit our needs perfectly.

We don’t often save and reuse old siding, but here it worked.

Most of the time the siding on an old house is worn out, dry and brittle from years exposed to the weather. We have found that so much of it breaks apart that there is never enough quality material to reuse.

And besides, most clients want a crisp new finish to their homes… not the “Beverly Hillbillies” look. But, here, on this woodworking shop, we went for it.

Once the stress skins were all up we popped the old doors and windows into place and put the slate back onto the roof.

Stress skin panels are light enough that these three men were able to cover this entire home by themselves without the aid of a crane.

And yet they were strong enough for this crew member to scamper up one of them with a handsaw to cut flush a peg that was still sticking out a bit.

Once the frame was complete we next covered the exterior with stress skin panels. I had these made differently than the standard type… these panels had wafer boards on both sides of the the foam core. I was not interested in having a nice painted drywall surface inside but rather wanted a wall surface where I could easily attach tools and cabinets.