This stonework is on a horse farm in the London ON area. When our son Nathaniel was still living, he found this project and sold them the stone. Nathaniel loved horses, and was able to find horse farms all over the province it seemed. We had this joke that it seemed like he could sense or smell them from quite a distance – he sure had his way of finding them!
One time Nathaniel came home from a sales tour and was telling us that he saw a beautiful black Arabian stallion at a horse farm that day. I laughed and commented that he obviously was doing more than just selling stone that day. My wife came up with the suggestion that I should take both boys to see the beautiful horse and have some time off. This didn’t take any persuading as I am a horse lover myself. We had a good night, and when we returned my wife asked, “How did you like the nice horse?” My answer was, “He was really nice, we bought him!” My wife was quite surprised and said, “I told you to look, not buy!” We have laughed about this many times since that night. That can tend to happen when horse lovers see a nice horse. There is much more to this story of the jet black Arabian stallion, that was extremely full of life and wasn’t broke to ride at 6 years old. Now it was my turn to stress, because Nathaniel had read in a book how to break a horse to ride using a method without bucking. Dad wasn’t so sure this was going to work out well, and Nathaniel had a transplanted kidney we had to protect. Looking back after both sons have passed, these are fond memories.
The hand made wooden trim on the gables and by the porch are quite amazing. A lot of labor and effort went into them, and fit the existing farm house and the stone so well.
The “soldier coarse” above the windows are flush with the rest of the stone. Some of our customers chose to extend their “soldier coarses” an extra inch to make them stand out more.
The white to grey limestone on this home, close to the Kissing Bridge (the covered bridge in the West Montrose area), is blended with a brown sandstone and beige limestone. The homeowner went to biggest city stoneyards to try to find something really amazing, only to discover that we had more selection to choose from here. He was very happy with his choices.
Nice detail on the front. Notice they saved the stone ruins of the old house (on left edge of picture above), which was going to be dressed up with plantings and become an amazing garden. The three front porch arches are much larger than the picture reveals, and I remember that as our masons were gently taking the support molds down they noticed the mortar had not cured well enough yet and started to move. I instructed them to snug them up again and we left them for a much longer period of time … scary moments! That makes a heart go thump, thump! The house is built on a farm property, so the old horse drawn wagon is fitting.
