installation and care Archives - Native Custom Stone

Ways to Incorporate Stone into Your Home’s Interior Design

Whether stone is old, newly quarried, synthetic, or made from cast concrete, it can be incorporated into the interior design of any home.

Of course you can build with stone, or use a stone veneer for walls or panels. Alternatively, you can use stone to create features and add style to any room in your home.

The Advantages of Stone Walls

There are so many stone products to choose from you’ll be spoilt for choice. But generally stone will add a natural, earthy vibe and a gorgeous texture other materials can’t provide. They help with the absorption of sound and also provide a unique pallet for adding pattern, color and texture to interior design. Better still, stone surfaces are generally exceptionally durable and easy to maintain.

Whatever you decide to use to incorporate stone into your home’s interior design scheme, you will find there is a wide range of stone types in a variety of price ranges. Some require professional installation while others are easily installed by competent DIY enthusiasts, using minimal tools.

Top Ten Interior Design Ideas for Incorporating Stone into Your Home

Use stone around a fireplace, but don’t cover the whole wall. It will enable you to add both color and texture to the room, creating your own unique character. This is a particularly easy project using lightweight manufactured stone veneer.
Build a kitchen island out of stone, or build a frame and add simulated stone cladding to make it look as if it is solid stone. Top the island with a slab of marble or granite, or tile the top with matching simulated stone tiles.
Tactile stone used on a bathroom wall can be the perfect foil to high-sheen tiles or even rustic stone tiles.
A conventional bath may be boxed in above ground and the sides tiled to match or contrast with the wall.
For something completely different, leave a gap between tiles in your entrance hall or even your bathroom floor, and lay river stones in mortar to create a handmade pattern. Push them into the soft mortar so that they don’t protrude too much and allow the mortar to set properly before walking on it.
Create the effect of exposed stone by cladding a feature wall with stone or stone veneer. It’s the perfect way to add the character of age, and will also add pattern and texture to the interior design scheme. For vivid contrast paint adjacent walls white or a very pale creamy stone color. Imaginatively done, there will be people who mistake this for original stonework.
If there are pillars in your home, cladding these with stone can create the most amazing effect. If you restrict the use of stone to the pillars alone, you will benefit from visual impact.
Clad the walls of a stairwell in stone and use lighting to highlight its texture. The stairs themselves may be tiled in a sympathetically matching color, or finished so that they create a contrasting effect.
If there’s sufficient light inside your home, build a stone planter and introduce plants that will thrive indoors.
Define a home bar area using stone both on the walls and on the bar itself. Manufactured Go-Stone panels will be ideal for this project.

Inspecting Your Home and Manufactured Stone Veneer for Moisture Damage

If the manufactured stone veneer in your home was installed correctly, it’s unlikely that you will find moisture damage, even in the wettest winter. However if precast simulated stone is not installed properly, and flashing is inadequate, water can quickly cause extensive structural damage.

Even if you can’t see any form of damage on wall surfaces, it’s essential to inspect your home and manufactured stone veneer for moisture damage. The reality is that most homeowners (and inspectors for that matter) don’t recognize moisture problems until it has set in and caused costly damage. Often they only realize that there is damage when telltale signs of leaking water become visible.

Building codes do set standards for the installation of manufactured stone veneer, including water-restricting barriers, flashing, and metal weep screeds. These are, though, minimal standards, and inexperienced or unscrupulous contractors don’t always follow them. Unfortunately construction is difficult to police because the building process is quick and the window for inspection is short. For example, barriers inside the structure that restrict water and vapor cannot be inspected once the house is complete unless the wall is opened up.

Ideally contractors should be forced to allow a certified InterNACH (International Association of Certified Home Inspectors) inspector to inspect the structure prior to completion.

About Manufactured Stone Veneer

Unlike cast stone that is normally used to build load-bearing walls on concrete foundations, manufactured stone veneer is a relatively lightweight product that does not require a foundation. It can be applied to most structures including wood and metal frames, enabling builders to achieve the aesthetic effect of real stone quickly and cost effectively.

While easy to install, if installation is not done correctly, serious water damage can occur over quite short periods of time – as little as two years. Because there is no air space between framed walls and cladding, the need for well-designed flashing is critical. If water cannot drain, even a seasonal rainstorm could cause damage.

Of course the ideal is to ensure that installation is done the right way. This checklist may be used for a thorough inspection:

Generally, if only mortar is visible between the veneer units, the veneer has been correctly installed. However design must include the specifications outlined in the building codes.
There should be weep screeds at the base of all wood-frame walls and at the tops of windows and doors.
Seams and joints around windows and doors, and where the manufactured veneer meets other cladding must be sealed. Manufactured stone windowsills that slope away from the building will aid drainage.
Flashing that is corrosion-resistant should be installed with a bedding seal under the flashing and with a drip edge. Water-resistant barriers should also lap over the flashing’s back edge for water to drain.
Veneer should not be in contact with ground surfaces or any part of the roof. This is a common fault that leads to water damage.
Kick-out flashing should divert water away from the building (and the veneer) to prevent water from penetrating the cladding and causing the structure to rot, or in the case of a metal frame, rust.

For additional protection, a good quality stone-sealing product like Natural Shield should be used. This will prime the surface and help to prevent water from penetrating. It will also reduce and minimize the possibility of freeze and thaw damage, cracking and stains.

How to Inspect Your Home and Manufactured Stone Veneer for Water Damage

Once you have inspected the installation of flashing and so on, look for evidence of water damage. Moisture inside walls will often cause efflorescence that shows up on the surface in the form of chalky powder. Check inside wall surface carefully for signs of mold or discoloration. Also run your hand over wall surfaces; if they feel cold and damp you can be sure you have water damage inside the wall structure.

If there is any evidence of moisture inside walls, they will have to be opened up, cleaned, and any damaged material replaced. The longer you leave it, the worse the problem will become, and the more repairs are likely to cost you.

If you do have to open up and repair walls, ensure that flashing and other water-repellent installations are done correctly second time around. Also be sure to coat all manufactured stone veneer surfaces with Natural Shield for maximum protection.

Using Custom Stone Veneer vs. Natural Stone for Your Project

Natural stone creates an amazing effect in homes and gardens, for walls and for feature structures including fireplaces, outdoor kitchens, water features and planters. But there’s a certain irony about this statement because you can create exactly the same effect using a custom stone veneer, and you’ll find it’s generally easier, cheaper, and much more manageable to maintain.

While there is a certain mystique about natural stone, largely based on tradition and the age-old skills of practiced stonemasons, modern technology has enabled us to manufacture faux stone in various forms, including veneer. Custom stone veneer and other faux stone products are perfect for both construction and finishing projects. Stone veneer is also a great tool for revamping and renovating walls and other indoor and outdoor features.

Effects You Can Create Using Custom Stone Veneer

Here’s another irony: unless you have an unlimited budget for natural stone, you have many more choices in terms of the effects created by using faux stone and veneers than you do when using natural stone. The reason is simple. When you use the natural stone from the area where you live, you are limited to what stone occurs naturally. If you opt for faux stone blocks or custom stone veneer you are limited only by the range produced by an accessible manufacturer like Native Custom Stone.

The reality is that manufacturers offering manufactured stone veneer products have dozens of styles and colors. There are also numerous different finishes and sizes that will give you the opportunity to copy any effect from an elegant castle stone finish to a typical rubble effect like the traditional ashlar, commonly used in southern USA.

Alternatively, you might want something that looks as if it was built using genuine fieldstone or perhaps river rocks. No need to go into the field or seek out a river, a good quality custom stone veneer or manufactured stone will provide you with the materials you need.

Working With Stone Veneer Rather Than Natural Stone

Traditional stonemasons didn’t need university degrees to do their work, but they did need incredible skills that were generally passed down through the generations.

While stone can be used in the form of boulders or random blocks, unless you are building a rockery or irregular dry-stone structure, the stone will need to be cut into blocks or slabs that will slot together or enable them to be laid neatly and effectively. Natural stone is heavy and can be challenging to cut.

Stone veneer, on the other hand, is available in the form of individual units or simple panels. Interlocking panels in particular, are very easy to install without any skills at all, other than the ability to use a spirit level to ensure they are laid level. They are also lightweight and easy to handle. Furthermore, no foundations or additional structural support is required and they can be used to clad a variety of frame types, both metal and wood, or even a masonry structure.

Typically natural stone walls vary in size from about 2 to 30 ins (or 51 to 762 mm). Manufactured stone veneer, on the other hand, is substantially thinner than natural stone blocks, varying in size from about 1 to 3 ins (or 25 to no more than 76 mm), partly dependent on the texture chosen.

So if you like the effect of natural stone, explore the options offered by the Native Custom Stone range of veneer products.