Rocks In My Head, rocks on my house.

Krista and I have been living in this house over 5 years now. I don't think back to the whole building process all that often. Anyone that enjoys building houses and selling them and building again is an absolute masochist. I am not going to gripe too much. We only plan on doing this once. Even if the house was built 5 years ago the never ending job of maintenance, landscaping, etc goes on.

Knowing that we were only going to do this once I wanted to put some sandstone on the inside and outside of the house. Every piece that graces the chimney, mantle, hearth and outside ashlar was hand picked and cleaned up with chisels and points. The lintels over the riverside door and dining room window are stone. They looked kind of bare so I engraved each of them. The lintel over the dining room window has the quote "A house is built with walls and beams: a home is made with love and dreams." The stone over the door facing the river was made in the tradition of a marriage stone. Marriage stones were once common over the doors of houses in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The lintels were often graced with the initials of of the people married, sometimes the date of marriage was added. Most times they were very simple, if not crude. Many of the lintels were wood and not stone so few examples survive today. 


Krista and I decided to do a couple of things in the older traditions of house building. The marriage stone was one. The other was the face the "front" of the house towards the river. You can still see a couple of older houses on the river today that have their front doors facing the river. This was back when boats sailed on this river and ferries crossed everyday in the ice free months. 
Below are a some photos of the stones. If you wonder why there is only one "KE" it is because Krista and I share these initials now that we are married and decided to go with that. The maple leaves represent the