Romancing the Stone...

A respectable smash hit movie of the 1980's relaunched the career of Michael Douglas and catapulted Kathleen Turner into instant stardom.  This romantic comedy....woah...hang on a minute...not that romancing the stone!  Look if you really want to know what the hell I'm talking about pop over to YouTube and have a gander at the trailer to refresh your memory (Romancing The Stone Trailer) and if none of this makes any sense wait a while - apparently a remake of the original film is in the works and is expected to be released next year.  You heard it here first folks!

No the stone I've been romancing about (having spent many months trawling the quarries across West Yorkshire) has finally arrived and it looks stunning!

Just look at the strata and the different colouration from pale buff through to dark grey.  Steve Rand, co-owner of Rand & Asquith Quarries up at Hove Edge has picked out some real gems.  The picture you can see above are the quoins which will be used to make up all of the external corners of the house.

You see the knack with cost-effective house building is all in the design and selection of the material.  As you will see in later pictures the quoins are cut at a very specific height of 290mm.  This height is exactly the same as a concrete block (used for the internal walls) and is the height of two walling stones.  So when the quoins are set out at the end of each run of wall the brickies job is made an awful lot easier because for every quoin laid they can wall two course of stone with minimal cutting - just like Lego - but the overall look is anything but!

To explain the concept have a closer look at the photo below.

The added benefit of adopting this system is that time is not lost dressing external corners (apart from openings) so in theory if you pick a decent builder the house structure should rise pretty quickly.  Oh and just before I go the saying goes "every cloud has a silver lining" well in the case of all new build houses this lining comes in the form of silver-foil backed insulation which is held to the internal block work preventing it touching the outer skin.  So effectively you have the decorative outer stone which provides the weather-proofing, then a cavity void then 50mm of Kingspan thermal insulation barrier then your internal blockwork...I should be nice and toastie this winter!

The picture below shows the insulation held to the blockwork with space invaders - the blue disks which clip neatly onto the wall ties (metal wires that prevent the stone from falling away from the internal blockwork - really important but dead simple - I bet the guy who invented the space invader disks is worth a few quid now!