Following the wisdom that you should use local rock whenever possible, a perimeter wall at the Brookline mid-century-modern house was made of locally available Roxbury puddingstone when the house was built in the 1950s.
The wall’s troubles began when the renovation required running a new sewer, waste, and water line from the street to the house. Jimmy McLaughlin and his excavator had to blow through the middle of the puddingstone wall to make way for the underground utilities. Years of tree roots hadn’t helped either—a line of trees along the wall had pushed sections forward, and the mortar had badly deteriorated over time.
“You don’t want to carry rock any farther than necessary,” says TOH landscape contractor Roger Cook. Puddingstone is known for its distinctive coloring, texture, shape, and overall attractiveness; it’s a conglomerate made up of various types of pebble, cobble, quartz, and sandstone. Different types of puddingstone are found around the world, and the type found in the Boston area is called Roxbury puddingstone, named for the town about two miles from the Brookline project.
After the TOH renovation required going through the puddingstone wall to repair underground pipes, mason Mark McCullough was called in to put the wall back together. One challenge he faced was today’s limited supply of puddingstone, so McCullough worked to reuse the existing material. “This is a unique stone and it’s almost impossible to find today, so luckily we were able to rebuild the wall with the original puddingstone,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than having an obvious repair where the original material ended and new material was brought in.” Who said a wall can’t be put back together again?
The careful art of rebuilding a stone wall so that new work is indistinguishable from old has a long tradition on This Old House. As veteran stonemason Rico D’Eramo, who laid his first stone in Italy at the age of 10, once told This Old House Magazine: “Everybody’s work is different. You hear a voice, you know it’s Pavarotti.” That philosophy—that a mason’s hand is as distinctive as a signature—underscores why McCullough was so meticulous about reusing the original puddingstone rather than introducing any new material that would betray the repair.
