What stone veneer is, in plain words
Stone veneer is a layer of stone set onto the face of a wall that's already there. The wall behind it carries the house. The stone is what you see, and it takes the weather.
Natural thin veneer is quarried or field stone cut down so each piece has a flat back and is only about an inch deep. That keeps it light. Light enough that it doesn't need its own footing or a ledge poured into the foundation, which full depth stone does. Full bed stone is the old way: stone laid at its whole depth, several inches thick, with something solid under it to carry the weight.
Both are real stone. The difference is how deep each piece is and what has to be built to hold it up.
Real stone or cast stone
A lot of what gets sold as stone veneer is manufactured stone. That's concrete cast in molds and colored to look like rock. It costs less up front and some of it looks fine from the road. Get close, though, and the color on a lot of it sits mostly at the surface, so a chip or a saw cut can show plain gray concrete, and the same few shapes start repeating across a wall.
Natural veneer is the stone itself. The color goes all the way through. It weathers the way the ledge in your yard weathers, and it can sit right beside an old fieldstone wall without looking like a copy of one.
Kevin's veneer work is natural stone. If you're weighing the two, the natural vs manufactured guide goes through looks, weight and cost factors side by side.
Where Kevin puts stone veneer
Most veneer work lands in a handful of spots on a house. Each one has its own page with more detail on how it's built.
- Foundations: the band of bare concrete between the siding and the ground, faced in fieldstone or granite
- Columns and posts: porch posts, deck supports and entry piers wrapped in stone
- Fireplaces: surrounds, hearth walls and full stone faces from floor to ceiling
- Lake homes: foundations, decks and walls on houses that face the water
How a veneer wall goes up
Good veneer is mostly about what happens before the first stone goes on. On a framed wall that means a water resistive barrier over the sheathing, lapped like shingles so water runs out and down. Then metal lath fastened through to the framing. Then a scratch coat of mortar, raked with grooves so the stone has something to grab. On clean, bare concrete or block, stone can often go right onto the masonry. Concrete that's been painted or sealed has to be cleaned back to bare or covered with lath first.
Then the stone. Outside corners get corner pieces, cut in an L, so the corner looks like a full stone and not a thin slice. Those go on first, and the flat stones fill in between them. Kevin picks each stone for size, shape and color so the joints stay even and the pattern doesn't repeat. Every piece gets mortar on its back and gets pressed into mortar on the wall.
The joints get filled and tooled once the stone has set up. How they're finished changes the look as much as the stone does. Deep raked joints throw shadow. Full joints look calmer. Tight fitted stone shows almost no mortar at all. It's worth talking through before work starts.
Built for New Hampshire winters
Freeze and thaw is what wrecks masonry up here. Water gets in, freezes, swells and pushes. So the details that keep water from getting behind the stone matter more in Ossipee than they would somewhere mild.
A few of them. Flashing over windows and doors, and anywhere a roof or a deck meets the stone. A cap or a drip edge at the top of a foundation band so rain off the siding runs over the stone and not behind it. Gutters that dump away from the wall. And a gap at the bottom. Installation guides from natural thin stone producers call for the first course to start about 4 inches above soil and about 2 inches above concrete, so the stone isn't sitting in wet ground or wicking up salt from a walkway.
Dry stack, the look with no mortar showing, is a different matter outside. Stone producers and masonry trade guides advise against dry stacking outside where winters freeze and thaw, because the open joints let water in. Inside, around a fireplace, it works fine.
Kevin Jones and Jones Legacy
Jones Legacy Stoneworks & Painting is a New Hampshire family business run by Kevin Jones out of Ossipee. Stone veneer is the center of the work. Kevin also builds New Hampshire fieldstone walls, walkways, steps and patios, takes on custom stone projects, and the company does interior and exterior painting.
The veneer work is geared to higher end homes around the lakes and up toward the mountains, where the stone is meant to look like it's been there as long as the house. The company line is “Built with pride. Made to last.”
Towns Kevin works in
Kevin is based in Ossipee and works across the Lakes Region and the Mount Washington Valley. On Lake Winnipesaukee that's Wolfeboro, Tuftonboro, Moultonborough, Alton, Gilford, Meredith, Center Harbor and Laconia. Up by Squam Lake it's Holderness and Sandwich. Around Ossipee Lake it's Ossipee, Tamworth, Effingham, Freedom, Madison, Wakefield and Brookfield. In the valley it's Conway, Jackson and Bartlett.
If you're close to one of those towns and not sure, text and ask.
