Dynamic Stone Work
What is Stone Veneer or Cultured Stone?
Have you ever gone by a home or business and thought, is that real stone? Who doesn’t love the beauty of natural stone? You can often achieve the look and feel of natural stone more easily and cost effectively with cultured stone.
Cultured stone is often as beautiful as the natural stone it emulates to a point where its hard to tell the difference. Cultured stone is a man made material designed to replicate the look of natural stone in a variety of architectural applications ranging from exterior details to, a unique statement interior walls. Some cultured stones offer such an array of shapes, sizes, and color gradations that even a trained eye can find it hard to determine the difference. In addition to its design versatility, cultured stone veneer often costs significantly lets than what natural stone does for the same project. In the case of Cultured Stone, each piece is hand-colored with iron oxide pigments that help the stone veneer maintain the colors and nuance of natural stone for decades to come. With thousands of individual molds and a commitment to ensuring no two pieces of manufactured stone are colored alike, Cultured Stone veneer can exhibit much of the same variation in shape, size, texture, and color as natural stone.
Like natural stone, stone veneer is virtually maintenance-free. Home and building owners merely need to wash the surface occasionally to remove dust or dirt.
About Stucco and E.I.F.S.
What is stucco made of?
Traditional masonry stucco is a cement-based plaster that is applied over walls and other surfaces inside and outside of buildings. It is made from cement, sand, and lime and hardens into a highly durable material that requires little maintenance. Like traditional decorative plaster, stucco can be troweled, brushed, or otherwise textured to create a variety of finish effects. Stucco typically is applied over a galvanized stucco wire, which helps the stucco adhere to the supporting structure and strengthens the entire assembly.
Stucco usually is mixed on-site and is applied in three coats. The first two, the scratch and brown coats consist of the traditional grey cement, sand, lime and water to give you a hard substructure to "stucco". This is broom finished or scratched to allow the next layer to bond. The third coat is a finish coat. The finish coat is dyed with mineral pigments giving the stucco a colored finish.
E.I.F.S. stands for "Exterior Insulation and Finish Systems." The product is also called synthetic stucco, and it is a multi-layered stucco finish as well. E.I.F.S. has multiple layers including a variation on the steps below:
1. A water-resistant barrier is generally black paper, Tyvek, or a roll-on coating applied to cover the substrate.
2. Adhesive attaches insulation board to the supporting structure. Mechanical fasteners can be used in some cases.
3. A foam insulation wither with channels or flat insulation foam board is secured to the exterior wall surface substrate, most often with adhesive.
4. A base coat,either an acrylic or polymer-based cement material, is applied to the top of the insulation then reinforced with glass fiber reinforcement mesh.
5. The reinforcement mesh is embedded in the base coat material.
6. The finish is a textured acrylic coat that's decorative and protective. This also comes in many different textures and colors.
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