The prettiest of all materials for a house is probably stone. This accounts for the increasing amount of houses with stone finishes erected in the past few years. But stone is also one of the most expensive materials you can use. Its use in home building costs is more than that of brick or stucco or wood. It comes as a real shock to new perspective home owners when they find out the cost difference because they had learned that when this country was young, stone was used by the poorest of farmers to construct their dwellings.
The reason the cost was so low in earlier days was that in the first place, the farmers back had to clear their fields of rock, rubble, and stone anyway, and the expense of carrying it to the construction site was no greater than the expense of carrying it anywhere else. So basically their material was supplied for free at the site! But today we have to pay for the quarrying of the stone and then more for the shipping.
And besides that, the roads and methods of transportation were so bad that it was near impossible to get brick even a few miles from brick kilns without a great amount of expense. Brick was therefore out of the question unless you had a brick kiln in your back yard or there was a waterway close by so it could be shipped by barge. Also, in those days bricks were made by hand and not by machine. The cost of molding bricks equaled or was sometimes greater than the cost of laying stone.
About the Author
My name is Tim Davis and I draw architectural and mechanical plans for a living. I also teach others how to draw house plans, site plans, mechanical and shop drawings and other types of drafting that I have been trained to do in a virtual classroom on the internet called 101 Info Dot Org at http://101info.org
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