Building with stone

[Nikki]

Hi all,

There's quite a lot online about building with adobe or strawbales. However, we'll be building with the local material, stone.

Does anyone know of websites or books that discuss green building with stone?

[mybarnconversion]

So long as you are sourcing stone on site (or close to it) then your green credentials are well established... the next step is mortar & for me that mean lime based mortars using local sand. Just search Google for 'lime mortar' there are some useful links on the first page ...

[Muddypause]

Also, you could do a bit of research about Thermal Mass. This is about using the mass of the building to store heat, and stone is pretty good for that.

The idea, really is to use the mass as a means of storing solar heat. However, the amount of use you can make of it in this context depends not only upon how much mass you incorporate in the structure, but upon your window area, too.

[Magpie]

The firsr thing that came to mind reading this was jackie french - she wrote "The House That Jackie Built
(Earthgarden, September 2001)

How to build your own stone house without a mortgage...plus stone walls, stone paving, a pond, stone stairs...and other ways to live the good life with 100 tonnes of granite and lots of concrete."

Do a Google for her and her book, see if you can track down a copy of this book - highly recommend it.

[paddy]

A lot of stone houses from old were built with " Field Stone "...which is 100% green because it was just stone picked from fields so they could be cultivated. These houses look the best i think because the stone is all sizes and all shapes.

The other stone is quarried stone which uses a lot of energy from blasting to digging out to sizing to transport etc etc.

In Ireland just for facing " cladding " your house in stone i think the stone mason charges around 60-80 euro's per square meter plus the cost of the stone around 20 lorry loads at a minimum of 500-800 euro's per load.

If you want a solid stone house you will need walls a minimum of 2 feet in thickness and then you will still need an internal wall.........the cost of this house is unimaginable i think unless you are quite wealthy of course.

I have knocked small solid stone cottages down and the amount of stone in them is fantastic and this is one way of having a good green house by buying a redundant old cottage and knocking it and rebuilding it how you want or transporting it to where you want but then of course labour costs come into it.

If you have no internal secondary walls you will get damp and insect problems.

[wulf]

And then you have to think about how you will work with the stone. Power tools are noisy, dusty and not particularly green. Working by hand is very slow: last week, I was doing some work on a patio for my mother-in-law and had to cut a hole for a sunshade support in the central stone:



That was somewhere over three hours of work, using a hand drill, pound hammer and cold chisel!

Fortunately the patio itself is precut to the right shapes!

Wulf

[Nikki]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the responses.

The stone we'll be using is local, right there on the land we'll purchase. Some might need transporting from nearby fields.

There are a few men in the Balkans who work/build with stone, and my DH has already met one and his sons who will likely do the job. The old houses of the region are all stone houses.

So that's all well and good. It was the green considerations of mortar, internal walls, thermal mass, etc, that is a midfield and I'm not sure where to begin.

Muddy -
Thanks for the reminder.
I was reading the archives of another forum, where the discussion was about thermal mass and included insulation, and there were comments about the amount of space between walls and damp and all sorts. Good grief. One site or book that concentrated on stone houses in particular would be necessary for me to not develop a brain freeze. lol

Magpie -
I'm trying to track it down. Thanks for the recommendation. :)

[paddy]

If it were me Nikki and i have thought about this in detail i would build an internal wall from block if you can, a 9" block as this will give you your thermal insulation especially if you use a good insulation in the cavity.

If you dont have an internal wall you will get damp problems....insect problems and any heat gain from the mass of the stone will be lost on heat transfer to the outside on cold days.

Also avoid using Granite, or soft type stone for various reasons.

You can never be completly green in the building of a house using stone as you will need foundations of concrete, i think not to have foundations would be foolish because of the expense involved. I know they didnt have foundations of concrete in the old days for a number of reasons and some of them are the reasons those old house arent here today.

I think the only proper green house would be of a timber construction.

[Nikki]

Hi Paddy,

I'm not sure what type of stone it is. It's just there, from the mountain and from old houses that fell during their last earthquake (yep, most didn't have foundations)

If it were me Nikki and i have thought about this in detail i would build an internal wall from block if you can, a 9" block as this will give you your thermal insulation especially if you use a good insulation in the cavity.

Do you mean concrete block (breeze block)?

What sort of cavity insulation would be appropriate?

I just found these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stone-House-Gui ... 97&sr=11-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Stone- ... 012&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stonebuilders-P ... 076&sr=8-1

[mybarnconversion]

I'm not sure what type of stone it is. It's just there, from the mountain and from old houses that fell during their last earthquake (yep, most didn't have foundations)

That raises another important point to note. If you're in an earthquake area then I guess that there will be local building / planning regulations that will need to be factored into your design. I'm no expert, but I think that for example in Italy, the use of lime instead of cement is difficult to get authorised in earthquake regions as cement is a requirement due to its greater strength.

You'll also need to consider the builders, again using lime as an example, many builders in the UK prefer cement to lime as it is less caustic, goes off quicker etc. Standard local building practices may be hard to overcome.

[madasafish]

"You can never be completly green in the building of a house using stone as you will need foundations of concrete, i think not to have foundations would be foolish because of the expense involved. I know they didnt have foundations of concrete in the old days for a number of reasons and some of them are the reasons those old house arent here today. "


Hm I live in a stone built house with walls 1 metre to 1.5 metres deep and with a cavity as well - built around 1812 and with no obvious foundations.. It's still standing..and there was no concrete then:-)

[paddy]

"You can never be completly green in the building of a house using stone as you will need foundations of concrete, i think not to have foundations would be foolish because of the expense involved. I know they didnt have foundations of concrete in the old days for a number of reasons and some of them are the reasons those old house arent here today. "


Hm I live in a stone built house with walls 1 metre to 1.5 metres deep and with a cavity as well - built around 1812 and with no obvious foundations.. It's still standing..and there was no concrete then:-)

Good for you i am glad to see you got one of the good ones.

There are a lot of buildings with no concrete foundations which have been around for hundreds and thousands of years...castles etc etc.....but most stone houses were put up maybe by the people who lived in them with stone they picked from their fields, and a lot of these houses simply weren't up to scratch.

[madasafish]

We were fortunate: the owner of the local estate wanted a lodge house: and built a 2 bedroomed house: fortunately he wanted to make an impression and two (4 metres high x 1 metre square ) stone pillars at the entrance of the 1,000 metre road that entered the estate meant he had to build some sort of foundations.. or they would have toppled over.

They are still here: and form the entrance to our yard and garden...I have no idea how many tonnes they weigh but must be a few.. Still vertical tho:-)

Then the house was added to in Victorian times and then in the 1970s...All in stone although some modern internal walls are brick.

A heat sink in summer.. and a heat drain in winter:-(

[paddy]

Could you not dryline it?????

[Stonehead]

[There are a lot of buildings with no concrete foundations which have been around for hundreds and thousands of years...castles etc etc.....but most stone houses were put up maybe by the people who lived in them with stone they picked from their fields, and a lot of these houses simply weren't up to scratch.

Ours is still here, too. And it's built from granite on "no" foundations. I say none, because the builders dug trenches and put the largest granite boulders in first, then built the walls on top.

Our steading buildings are the same, as is the croft house across the road, the farm further down, the next croft house after that, and so on. All around 120-140 years old.

But the big estate house over the hill, which had foundations, is now gone - except the foundations...