26) Stone

I love stone. It’s natural and enduring. It looks traditional. We have planned to use a fair bit, both inside and outside. Stone is expensive to install. Estimates run $60 – 100 per square foot. To install as much as I want would cost the price of our whole first home.
Some stone comes to BC from China and India (NOT green). There are two suppliers of local stone in our region, although neither is on the Sunshine Coast.
Much as I’d like to, we can’t use the round boulders on our lot for the interior and exterior masonry because the labour would be prohibitive. I plan to use it (and recycled concrete) for the many short retaining walls we will have to build on our mountainside.
Cultured stone is looking more and more like real stone. It’s much cheaper than real stone. Generally it is lighter and more evenly-shaped, thus easier to install. It’s manufactured far away. Not green.
So the plan is to have the fireplace built first by a professional, to supply heat and dry out the house, and then do the rest of the areas as we can afford it. The building scheme requires that the exterior be completed within a year of taking out the building permit. I suspect that the neighbours are pretty tolerant of not following this building scheme, as two of the houses are not apparently finished, for much longer than a year. However, we don’t want to make enemies of our neighbours, so we would like to finish the exterior in the time suggested.
I have found a locally-quarried stone that I like, and am getting quotes from the suppliers and some stonemasons here. One thing I have discovered is that trades are quite readily available on the coast. I’m not sure that they are as competitive as on the mainland (i.e. Vancouver) but again, that’s part of the green philosophy: use local materials, hire local labour. It’s research-in-progress.

Tagged as: costs, green materials, local labour, stone selection