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Phony stone above the roof

Gene_Davis | Posted in Construction Techniques on March 20, 2009 05:30am

Do any of you builders, if finishing a wood-chase chimney above the roof, do anything to give the look some authenticity, using stepped counterflashing?

Or, are we the only ones who would know, so therefore a detail like this is just wasted effort and money?

The phony stone makers want their product held up off grade, so as to avoid water uptake in the system.  Holding it up off the roof seems prudent, but I do not know if they specify that.

The problem is, if holding it up off the roof, there is that ugly tattle-tale void.

What to do?  What to do?

All I can find from Eldorado and Owens Corning is attached.  They are saying to keep a void under there.

 

 

View Image

“A stripe is just as real as a dadgummed flower.”

Gene Davis        1920-1985

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Replies

  1. jej | Mar 20, 2009 05:57am | #1

    i wounder if you could apply real rock first row then the fake above

  2. joeh | Mar 20, 2009 06:34am | #2

    Seems there wouldn't be the same continuous moisture as if it were in ground contact.

    In fact, if it isn't raining or snowing there wouldn't be any more moisture from the roof than there is from the rain coming down on it?

    Joe H

  3. DanH | Mar 20, 2009 06:39am | #3

    Why not fill the void with a box of flashing, painted black? You could still leave a slight gap between the (slanted outward) top of the box and the stone -- wouldn't be visible from below.

    The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. -John Kenneth Galbraith
    1. User avater
      Gene_Davis | Mar 20, 2009 06:52am | #4

      Eldorado slyly does not show roof pics at their site, but Owens Corning sure does. 

      In all that O-C shows, all but one have anything going on below, and most look like a failure waiting to happen.

      I seem to recall either FH or JLC proudly showing an article by a phony-stone mason (he's not phony, he's just a mason applying phony stone), in which he ignored the keep-the-bottom-up-off-grade thing.

      Most all of them ignore that.

      If you look at the lead or copper counterflash work up on a real masonry chimney, done well, you see pretty big stepping and standing up going on.

        

      View Image

      "A stripe is just as real as a dadgummed flower."

      Gene Davis        1920-1985

      1. User avater
        Gene_Davis | Mar 20, 2009 06:56am | #5

        And then when you are paying Norm, Tommy, and the whole Tedd Benson crew about one-point-three million, in pre-meltdown dollars, for your vanity barn, you at least get a little copper.

        This TOH job (Weston, MA) used machine-sawn real-stone veneer, IIRC.

          

        View Image

        "A stripe is just as real as a dadgummed flower."

        Gene Davis        1920-1985

      2. Henley | Mar 20, 2009 02:39pm | #6

        A few years back at this point, I worked for a

        company out of OldForge doing Cultured stone.

        they would make a ledger below the stone and

        flash right over it.

        Looked "real" and kept the stone up off the deck.

      3. Piffin | Mar 20, 2009 03:02pm | #7

        wondering what idiot designed some of those. A chimney in a valley is a disaster in waiting no matter what.The two where thee chimney is at the ridge could have the stone right down to the roof with no problem since water is flowing away from and won't be seeping up into the manmade stone.For the look you are thinking of so that the stone doesn't seem to be floating like in your last photo with the bare copper , you can lay down a 2x3 and build the flashing with an extra fold/step in it to cover the 2x3 and still fit behind the stone application.As far as adding steps counter flash for "authenticity" remember that the oldest stone chimneys did not have that feature. It came along when we started building with block and topping with stone veneer. 

         

        Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!

        1. User avater
          Gene_Davis | Mar 20, 2009 03:20pm | #8

          In one of David Macaulay's wonderfully illustrated books about building, he shows a typical cathedral being built over a span of 250 years, in the late middle ages.

          All the stone was "preengineered" in that it was designed, detailed into parts lists, each part cut at quarry yards to specs and marked with chiseled-in ID callouts, then ox-carted to the site.  Rectilinear joinery.

          Maybe they did a little stepping?  Their puritan descendants, 300 years later, using raw boulders from the farm fields of the Massachusetts bay colony, were just taking short cuts, being the skinflints they were, by not chiseling square.

          Thanks for your remarks.  A standoff block as substrate will work nicely to flush out the copper or lead sheet flashing to the face of rock, or at least out to the grout surface.

          Norm or Tommy would have picked up on that and done it in Weston, but probably were not up on the roof that day. 

          View Image

          "A stripe is just as real as a dadgummed flower."

          Gene Davis        1920-1985

          1. Piffin | Mar 20, 2009 03:26pm | #9

            Your examples here may be the diff between commercial and residential, and union/non-union;) 

             

            Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!

  4. seeyou | Mar 20, 2009 03:50pm | #10

    What we typically do is install a 2x4 around the perimeter of the chimney base. We step flash to that 2x4 (I'm assuming asphalt shingles) and then do a thru flash detail up the front of the 2x4, back to the chase sheathing and up under the house wrap. Then the peel and stick stone is applied above that 4" or so tall band of copper.

    If you wanted to get fancy, you could build "steps" and thru flash on top of them to give the conventionally flashed "stairstep" look.

    http://www.quittintime.com/      View Image        

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