May all your doings bring joy and prosperity.

I had a client on Lake Sammamish who, among a lot over other work, wanted to figure out a way to cover up some old unsightly brick...

With styles ranging from the ordinary to the ornate, pavers bring style and structure to your hardscape projects. When you are deciding...

When an old non-functioning waterfall/pond was converted into a lovely patio At this hillside house in Mountlake Terrace, WA there had...

Flagstone, cobbles and ledgestone - these natural elements bring life to your surroundings. Hardscaping is the word we use now to...

This outdoor staircase is veneered with stone treads and large porcelain tiles. Take a look at the process. To begin with my client had this old failing porch made of exposed aggregate and brick. The whole structure had sunken by up to 2" in places and needed a complete replacement. Seemed simple enough to bust it up and haul it away, so I brought over a jackhammer and started in, removing the bricks first. Turns out it wasn't so easy. The back portion of this slab was over 2

Antique brick, Bluestone slabs, a clay tile roof and some quirky salvaged features made this a fun and creative project, our first pizza oven. Near Lincoln Park in West Seattle. My client showed me some antique ceramic sconces from Italy, some red clay roof tiles, and an old turbine barn ventilator. "I want the pizza oven to look like a house and it should incorporate these somehow." It so happens I had just seen a great instance of a house-shaped oven so I was eager to get s

This very linear and even-surfaced material has it's own way about it. Its flat and squarish shapes make it easy to stack, yet it's brittle nature makes it unpredictable to shape without sawing. A certain variety, Montana Rustic (a metamorphic sandstone) provides plenty of square corners while the reddish slates have almost no square ends. This material was chosen to compliment the rustic Corten Steel siding on the house. The process is painstaking but always very satisfying.

This Mid-Century Rambler is getting a major remodel done and they asked me to install some quartz flagstone in the entryway. This look is...

This was a fun project we did where the customers specifically wanted a wall with "a lot of visual character" and we did not disappoint. We took a bunch of random granite rubble and split it up into more flat and square-ish pieces while keeping some of the randomness intact. They were interested in incorporating a bench in the wall, so I suggested making it kind of like a stone couch. This holds up the hill where their vegetable garden will be soon. This included two small st

Hardscape paving is a valuable asset on any property. It expands your living space and makes your yard more functional and traversable,...

The building industry has in many sectors begun to embrace the concept of Green Building. While this is still very much a voluntary standard, an increasing number of builders and architects are touting their adherence to the philosophy of Green or Sustainable Construction . But how does stone fit into the equation? There are multiple sets of official standards that have been established to rate the “green”-ness of a project or a type of material. The most notable of these

Creating order out of natural chaos Probably the most popular work I am regularly asked to do is to build patios and walkways out of...

This recent landscape masonry staircase was installed in Mountlake Terrace just north of Seattle WA.

An unfinished and steep front yard is transformed into a sturdily-constructed new terrain. Walls were made using existing granite boulders, many of them split in two using drills and wedges. Here is a project we did a few years ago on Lake Sammamish, and pardon me but I need to get some new photos since it was replanted. This work is hard to photograph because of its multiple levels but this is the view from the dock on the lake. That foreground area was dug out extra low b

Nice consistent colors and textures in this Queen Anne Neighborhood walkway project This was a customer I had worked for a couple of...

This new front walkway was installed this past month. The house had been remodeled and landscaped a few years prior but the front steps...

There will be regular entries and articles about stone construction, data about stone and rock materials, photographs of our latest...