Limestone Garden wall. Lebanon PA.

On this stone masonry project we have a garden wall that used to be the front of a building. Most of the building was taken down to make room for a parking lot. All that is left of this part of the origional building is this stone garden wall. The building was like a row home that had a few seperate housing units in it. It was a two story building and the wall in this photo used to extend all the way up to the top of the second floor. It is not easy to find large nice limestone like the one’s that this wall was built with. So, as this building was coming down the stone were saved and they were reused on this project.

As I mentioned this wall was the front of a building so it had several door openings in it. The openings needed to be layed shut or closed off in a way that it was almost impossible to tell that they ever were there. To accomplish this the first step was to “tooth out” the wall. This means take out the smaller pieces of stone on either side of the door opening, so it is possible to overlap the stone. This eliminates a long vertical mortar joint that otherwise would have been there that basically would have outlined where the door used to be. After the wall was toothed out the stone that were saved from the upper part of the wall were used to lay the openings shut. By reusing the stone it was possible to have a perfect match. After all the openings were layed shut the wall was topped off with concrete caps. Then the entire wall was repointed with an off white mortar color.

This stone masonry project is located in Campbell town / Palmyra in Lebanon county P.A.