I introduced my wife to the fine art of stripping windows.  We're re-using a lot of the old windows, which need to be stripped, repaired, and re-glazed.  It's a lot of work, but it will keep the old feel of the house, and save a ton of money.  She's gone through about three gallons of stripper by this point.  Everybody that sees her doing this tells me that I owe her...big time.  

Finished framing and roofing the Bay Window (Bay Winder for you rednecks).  What a pain.  That little roof took all day to frame, flash and roof.  The two side wings also have windows, but are covered with the plywood until I cut the holes out.

Since we removed the original brick porch columns last August, the front porch has been been braced up in the air on 4x4s, not the most desirable condition in earthquake country (yesterday we had a 5.4 jolt about 40 miles from here that woke us up).  With the weight of the roof, the porch could easily swing around or bounce up and snap off the house if not strapped to the ground.  So despite my anxiousness to continue framing, I decided to build the two new stone porch columns with their wooden post tops.  

We had been collecting rock for months, stacking them in wire baskets on pallets, and had about 8 pallets worth (a ton of work in itself).  We got it free from a tract home development that was blasting.  "Shot rock" is easier to build with than river rock, which is more rounded and harder to stack.  Our local rock is blue granite, which is among the hardest rock in the country.  To "trim" it, you put on safety goggles and whang on it with the biggest sledge hammer you have.  Usually only a tiny piece will chip off, propelled at supersonic speeds.

Building a column is harder than a wall because you have so many outside corners that you have to find stones with right angles for.  Like the chimney, I strung four plumb lines denoting the outside corners as a guide to keep the column straight.  You set the rocks in a dry mix of concrete rather than mortar, as the mortar is expensive and squishes out of the joints too easily, smearing all over the face of the stone.  To build this one column took twelve 60 lb. sacks of concrete.  Rake the joints out to a depth of 1" to be filled in with mortar later.  About this point you'll discover that there's nothing easy about stonework: you're either carrying rocks, busting rocks, or mixing and lugging concrete.  Sore hands and arms are the rule.

The process is to build a box, then fill in the box with concrete and rubble, working your way up layer by layer.  Rocks can be braced in place with shims of split rock, then concreted in place.  The process goes slow as you hunt for the right rock to fit the opening, and you may have to trim it some, not an exact process (they don't always break where you want).

The joints are filled in with a pastry bag filled with SpecMix mortar.  After the joint sets up a bit, tool the joint with a pointing trowel.  If the mortar becomes wet as you tool it, you need to wait a little longer.  For this mortar style, I fill the joint pretty much flush with the face of the stone.  After the mortar sets up a little more, I brush it with a wire brush to roughen the surface slightly, then with a whisk broom to remove the crumbs.  Let this set up overnight.  For deep parts, you may have to do two coats.

The concrete caps are formed by 2x4s clamped around the column base, and another set of 2x4s actually forming the cap.  A grid of rebar is suspended in the middle.   Carefully level and square the forms, and fill with 5000 PSI concrete.  Run a palm sander around the outside of the form to vibrate the concrete to settle it and fill any voids, and tool the top edges to a curve.  Allow to cure a day, keeping it damp.

The final step for the joints will be to apply a mortar "bead".  This is a prominent feature in a lot of stonework from the early 1900's we've seen.  A bead of mortar is applied with a pastry bag, and then tooled with a home-made sheet-metal beading tool to make a raised profile.  This makes the shape of the rocks appear more uniform.