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So for two months now, I've been mortaring stone over the stucco on the exposed walls. After my experience putting up stone in my office and for the fireplace in the family room, I knew I could do this but it is a project on a whole 'nother scale. Fortunately, there is no deadline except that I wanted to get most of this done before the heat of summer. To that end, I figured out how much mortar I could mix and use it all before it set too thick to use (approximately 2.5 gallons as it turned out). So I made a goal of averaging at least 6 batches per week, though many weeks I exceeded that.
As of lunch time today, I am 80% done, but I have to wait to do the rest (two more courses). I had to leave space to be able to get stucco on the underneath of the overhang. Colored stucco will be the final finish for both the overhang and the parapet wall above it. Before I can do that, I'm going to glue up 2"-thick expanded polystyrene foam boards on the front of the parapet wall, both for a thermal break (to help keep the soil above the house from heating up) and also for a smooth substrate for the finish stucco. But I'm going to rest for a while, and work some more on cleaning out the shop and cutting and hauling some dead trees on the land, before I jump back in to putting up the foam.
The stone I put up is ledger stone, that comes in interlocking panels that are 24" long, 9" tall, and 3/4 to 1-1/2" thick. It is real stone (quartzite), which is very dense and hard. Each panel weighs about 20 lbs., so between hauling, measuring and cutting to size when necessary, and then putting them up on the wall, I got a lot of upper body and arm workouts. We looked at a lot of products, including the manufactured "Eldorado Stone" that I put up on my office wall, but for outside exposure to the Texas summer sun I knew that wanted real stone. The only disappointment with this stone is that the color is not what was in the showroom. We ordered "Golden Honey", which was supposed to be all warm earth tones, browns, tans, gold, yellow, etc. The eight pallets delivered were all marked "Golden Honey", but the colors are different than what we were expecting. After we checked several different boxes at random, we decided we could live with it and not to go through the time and hassle of returning it all and trying to get something different.
The walls are now about 15" thick, and the inside temperature is more stable and slower to change than ever before.
The gray stucco surrounds on the windows and doors will finished with the same color stucco as the parapet wall and overhang (yet to be determined by the
). The white wood trim around the windows and doors are all just primed currently, and will also be painted that same eventual color. The openings cut out of the stone are for sconce lights and power outlets (most of the power outlets are lower and I've already installed them with their face plates).
As of lunch time today, I am 80% done, but I have to wait to do the rest (two more courses). I had to leave space to be able to get stucco on the underneath of the overhang. Colored stucco will be the final finish for both the overhang and the parapet wall above it. Before I can do that, I'm going to glue up 2"-thick expanded polystyrene foam boards on the front of the parapet wall, both for a thermal break (to help keep the soil above the house from heating up) and also for a smooth substrate for the finish stucco. But I'm going to rest for a while, and work some more on cleaning out the shop and cutting and hauling some dead trees on the land, before I jump back in to putting up the foam.
The stone I put up is ledger stone, that comes in interlocking panels that are 24" long, 9" tall, and 3/4 to 1-1/2" thick. It is real stone (quartzite), which is very dense and hard. Each panel weighs about 20 lbs., so between hauling, measuring and cutting to size when necessary, and then putting them up on the wall, I got a lot of upper body and arm workouts. We looked at a lot of products, including the manufactured "Eldorado Stone" that I put up on my office wall, but for outside exposure to the Texas summer sun I knew that wanted real stone. The only disappointment with this stone is that the color is not what was in the showroom. We ordered "Golden Honey", which was supposed to be all warm earth tones, browns, tans, gold, yellow, etc. The eight pallets delivered were all marked "Golden Honey", but the colors are different than what we were expecting. After we checked several different boxes at random, we decided we could live with it and not to go through the time and hassle of returning it all and trying to get something different.
The walls are now about 15" thick, and the inside temperature is more stable and slower to change than ever before.
The gray stucco surrounds on the windows and doors will finished with the same color stucco as the parapet wall and overhang (yet to be determined by the
). The white wood trim around the windows and doors are all just primed currently, and will also be painted that same eventual color. The openings cut out of the stone are for sconce lights and power outlets (most of the power outlets are lower and I've already installed them with their face plates). 
