The End of Tuckpointing

The tuckpointing is finished! It was an ongoing project for the bulk of the summer and today my wife finished off the last bit. The pointing ended exactly where the slipforming ended last year - the south peak.

We are ecstatic that we can move on from another very large project. Hats off to my wife and my mom for doing all the tooling.

Today we also started putting trim around the windows.

And on Saturday ... watermelon harvest!

Tuckpointing

Amongst other things, we have been spending a lot of time tuckpointing the joints between stones. We started out doing this by hand, which proved to be a painfully slow process. Then we tried a grout bag, which we never got the hang of. While doing an internet search, my Mom found this little gem - the quikpoint mortar gun. We were hesitant to buy it because of the expense of a tool we weren't sure would work for us. After I called the company I was convinced we should buy it. They were very courteous and seemed to sincerely want their product to work for us.

This tool has greatly increased our speed. I would highly recommend purchasing one if you have a lot of pointing to do and not a lot of skill. Here is our process.

Stones in the wall.

Errant concrete chipped out of the joints with a rock hammer.

Joints filled with mortar gun. We have been using quikrete's mason mix mixed with Gibco's MRF. You can find information about Gibco's plasticizer on the quikpoint website.

Tool the joints with hi-tech pointing tools (bent butter knives).

Voila! The unskilled mason's solution to pointing a stone wall.

 We also (finally) finished putting in windows. The last window we installed was the arched one on our south peak. In order to make the arched buck, my dad cut arches out of treated plywood and sandwiched them together. To our surprise, it actually went in quite well.

More Windows

While working on the tuck point (blog to come), we have been working on a handful of smaller projects. One of which was cutting in some windows. Up until this point, we had never framed a window into a wooden opening. We had only put windows into concrete openings. Once we figured out the first window, the second one went in pretty easily. We found our instructions online, so I’m not going to go into detail on how to do it. It is fairly straight forward although, just like everything else it comes with its own terminology – king studs, jack studs, cripples etc.

We are about 2/5 done with the tuck pointing, but I am taking pictures of each stage on one section of wall that isn’t done yet. We should be done with that soon and then I will relay the results.