Our showroom in Wilmington, Delaware is available by appointment. Our business hours are 9AM - 5PM, Monday thru Friday. To make an appointment contact Howard Garfinkel at: (610) 761-1717
Permitting will vary by municipality. Permitting has increased since around 2005. At that time adhered stone veneer (stone that is mortared directly to a wall) was fairly new: as a result installation mistakes were made that resulted in water damage. Current specifications and local codes have been updated to insure that these issues will not return.
Water will get behind the stone, the danger is that it must not be allowed to get behind your moisture barrier. Water must have a way to flow down your wall, and when it gets to the bottom of your wall it must have a way to escape from your wall. New installation codes focus on these issues. New materials, including weep screed and rain screen have been developed to insure that these problems are avoided.
In one word (other than a truck running into your wall): Water. You need to direct water, such as from a roof or gutter, away from the stone. Even granite, from a steady drip of water will erode. The ‘tools’ used to direct water away from your wall are called flashing. Flashing is used to keep water from getting behind your stone, and from running directly onto the surface of your stone.
Our product is light weight. Fully saturated with water our stone has tested at 10.3 lbs. per square foot. Installation codes require adhered stone veneer to weigh less than 15 lbs. per square foot.
(Ledgestone is also known as stacked stone): we do not recommend a mortar-less joint for this product. We believe that we are too far north, that there are too many freeze-thaw cycles for the stone to say on the wall ‘forever’. If you do want the mortar-less look you need to use a good bonding agent. As a way of cheating, you can create a joint that is raked out so that at least ½” of mortar is between the stone and the surface of your scratch coat.
3 simple things that you can do:
a. Each stone should look like the stones below it can carry the weight of the stone above it
b. The corners should go ‘long-short-long-short’, so that it appears that the weight of wall is self-supporting itself
c. Install a 2' return for your façade: If you do not use corners it will look like the wall is 2” thick; if you use corners the wall will look 6” thick; if you install a 2' wide return: it is more realistic
The danger is water getting behind the stone and then not having some place to go. A horror story that I often tell concerns a builder who installed our stone on a 35' high chimney. He then put several coats of water sealer on the stone. When there was a leak in the capping of his chimney (at the very top) the water flowed down the wall. When it got to the bottom of the wall it didn’t have anywhere to go. Eventually the water pressure was so high that the water that had accumulated at the bottom of the wall ‘blew the face’ off of the stone.