Beware the sloping walkway. The idea sounds nice, but this is the type of situation that needs completion of thought which is often overlooked. If the walkway rises to the stoop, the soil on either side must be added to in order to rise with it. That sounds simple enough. But that also means that the soil will be higher than the soil up against the main part of the house. This will trap water and will obviously slope back toward the house directing runoff toward it. The pictures that I posted above (red house) show exactly this situation as it is handicap access. As simple as it looks, this took careful planning and some major alterations to that porch design. All the framing of the porch is pressure treated wood. It is coated with a waterproof membrane and then has stone and mortar over it (on top of a poured concrete wall and blocking on a footing to support the masonry). More importantly, the porch juts out 10' from the main wall of the house. That along with the grainite curbing next to the walk, allowed the soil to slope down along the face of the porch, still have clearance between the house wood and the soils surface, to continue to slope across the face of the house, and finally continue across the side yard lawn at a 2% slope the whole way. Those conditions don't exist and can not be easily created at your front stoop. You could add bluestone on top of the stoop, but it will add a minimum of two inches in height. That will make your already high front step even higher, the threshold of the front door lower, and all the trim work on the porch to be redone (and possibly some flashing work as well). I don't think you'll get the return on your investment if you hire a good mason to do it. I think you will have nothing but problems if you have less than a skilled mason do it. Your landscaper should be able to level out a few pieces of bluestone and replace the dangerous ones, but it would not be a bad idea to get an estimate from a reputable mason who does this type of work all of the time.

Greetings! I've been browsing the net for tips on just this subject and your thread has answered a lot of questions - thank you! I just have one more inquiry - do you know of a way to make the end product of one-part self curing silicones (after curing) softer and stretchier (lets say more like human skin, goal hardness is 10-30 shore A)? The reason I'm asking: I am a resident in heart surgery and I'm trying to make practice models of parts of the human heart and tissue to use for training outside the operating room. As you said the platinum cure silicones are used for this purpose but the price difference is tenfold and they're a bit too expensive for us.

Amazing thread! Great tips. I began salvaging the old double-hungs from our 1913 house we sold to a builder -- he gave me 7 days to get everything out I wanted and was amazed that I pluck so much: all the doors, windows, stair rail, cabinets, even the lovely trim around all the doors and windows. I used them to rebuild a house on our ranch in Texas. Fortunately I had a skilled carpenter who built the house around the salvage material. The next house he built required more windows, which I found through a demolition company who called me whenever they had a house with windows in good condition. Great way to harvest shiplap as well. We're in the process of building again, and this time my "picker" got windows that need work, so I sent them to a carpenter who is framing them so the crew can just slip them in like a store bought. The key is to get the entire window out, in the frame, and don't forget the weights! You'll save a lot of money if you don't have to build the frame and all the mechanisms of the weighted window. My attempts to deal with the vinyl replacment contractors has FAILED -- they simply refuse to take the time to pull the window out in the frame, like the pictures show above, they leave the frame and rip up the sashes as they pull them out. Crazy!!! I offer them good money, too. Fortunately we live in a neighborhood where anything pre-1940 is being bulldozed and replaced by McMansions. That's the best place to hunt.

As my partner likes to remind me, those treasures have to be moved, cleaned, stored, organized and reorganized, and usually modified. In our case, they often end up getting moved multiple times before installed, sold or donated. The perfect item is usually not available at the perfect time or place and if it is, there is probably a pricetag that reflects the sellers opinion of that perfection. One of my weaknesses is vintage light fixtures. I have a couple of gorgeous ones hanging in my garage that will have to be moved with me to hang in the new garage until the right location calls out for one of them. I love the unique items and figuring out where to use them, but the logistics of using the cheap finds ensures that very few actually end up to be true bargains. This bed is one of my favorite salvage pieces. Of course, it wasnt a bed until my partner and I invested many hours into assembling the parts. The headboard and footboard started life as newel posts and stair railings and the bed rails came from an oak fluorescent light fixture. We bought the stair railings and posts at a demo sale and removed them ourselves. We disassembled, trimmed, rearranged, and assembled a bed. The direct costs were under 200 dollars but when the hours are added up, this bed is priceless.