STONE WORK I FEATURE
Where others see a crumbling wall, this landscaper sees potential
Landscape designer would rather rebuild than replace.
LANDSCAPER Joe Boterman admits that his is not the most efficient process.
Rather than bulldoze an existing feature, most often a retaining wall, and cart the rubble off to the dump, he will disassemble it, clean every stone, and turn something old into something new.
If the remnants aren’t quite enough, as with work Boterman did on a Cambridge house built by Jacob Hespeler, he’ll scour >>
>> the site or nearby fields where the originals came from for the perfect additions.
And if the new feature doesn’t quite match his vision, he sees only one real option – take it down and start over, until it looks just right.
“With us, a job isn’t done until it’s done. If it doesn’t look right, and something has to be redone, then it’s getting redone,” says Boterman. “It’s not a good business decision, but it’s what we do.”
That approach can lead to delays — the kind that led one Waterloo customer to dub her project the Great Wall of Redwood Place. Still, neither Boterman nor his ideal customers would have it any other way.
“It was a joke,” explains homeowner Pauline Tuerr. “It took so long to build, it was almost like the Great Wall of China.”
But she loves the result. The project cost $26,000. She couldn’t use her front steps for 4½ months, and had a portable toilet in her yard the entire time. But she considers it all a small price to pay. “We couldn’t be more pleased.”
“I really just want to emphasize the fact that there are still people out there who do this calibre of work,” Tuerr explains. “My dad was in the building industry, originally from Germany, and he used stonemasons from Germany, where it actually was a skill and a trade that was learned. Nobody does that anymore.”
The home Tuerr shares with husband, Bob Hustwitt, already had a stone walkway – with three tiers and flower beds, all held in place by a fieldstone retaining wall – when they bought it a decade earlier. But the step heights were uneven, the tiers got narrower and beds got wider as you climbed. And everything was starting to crumble.
A hasty patch job five years later solved nothing. The company “just sent some young kids over; they just kind of slapped mortar into the parts that were falling apart, and that was it. And they put the capping on,” says Tuerr. But “a year later it was all heaving.” When the couple later decided to have their
front entry properly restored, Tuerr set out to find the sort of craftsman or artisan her father favoured. Word of mouth, including a recommendation from a local landscape architect, led her to Boterman and his company, Gravity Works.
“I just liked him. I just had this funny feeling that he was a really honest person.” “He quoted us a price. They ran into all kinds of problems, but he never changed the quote. Even though it took them two months longer than he thought it would.”
Gravity Works essentially is Boterman, Laura Blott (no official title, but person Friday seems to fit) and the occasional part-timer. The company used to be bigger. When Boterman bought out his former boss, contracts included maintaining the lawns, shrubs and bushes at Wilfrid Laurier University.
“I have tried to be bigger. I had eight employees at one time. But I found what it did was take me away from what I liked,” he explains. “I’m not a great administer, so I like to actually do the work.” He admits to being a perfectionist. In his head, every stone has a perfect place. But few of his employees could read minds. “You try to tell everybody else how you do what you like doing and very often you’re not pleased with their result. At least that’s what I found.” Today, Boterman and Blott average a dozen jobs per season — one or two large projects like the Great Wall of Redpath, and perhaps a half-dozen smaller stone jobs. They’ll also take on some basic sodding or planting, mostly for longtime customers or as part of a stone project.
“We’re not trying to distance ourselves from that part of it, because it’s still enjoyable to do that. I really like dressing my own stonework. They also enjoy working with wood. They’ve done a few timber frame projects, in one case building a barbecue area of stone and wood that helped a large landscape company win an award of excellence from Landscapes Ontario. >>
>> “The timber work was all done in the traditional form, with mortise and tenon joinery,” explains Boterman. “And, of course, we did the walls.”
They will happily work with wood again. “But we are certainly trying to project that we do this stonework as well as anybody else.”
His ideal customers, like Tuerr and Hustwitt, share his love of stone.
“I grew up in a house on Rosemount years ago, and we had the same sort of fieldstone wall,” Tuerr remembers. “That’s just the look that I like.”
Boterman has little interest in the prefab materials found in many backyards. Produced in bulk and often interlocking, the styles are tied to seasonal trends.
“Prefab concrete, stone and pavers, they always follow contemporary style,” he says. “Natural stone has no such restriction on it; it’s timeless. It always looks like it fits.”
And it lets him give customers something truly unique.
He can and will work from the detailed plans of a landscape architect. But his ideal customer is the architect or homeowner who knows roughly what they want, and will work with him to realize a shared vision.
“So, if we go to someone’s house, they can really project themselves into the project,” says Blott. For one project, “we did a curved deck with a stone riser, and you are never going to see that deck anywhere else. That’s a one-of-a-kind project. You just wouldn’t do it twice. This was this person’s wish.”
Tuerr and Hustwitt likewise knew what they wanted — pretty much what they had, restored and improved. Beyond that, they trusted him.
“They showed an appreciation of our abilities,” says Boterman, “which was really nice. They allowed us great flexibility. Every time I went to them with an idea, they’d say, ‘Well, you’re the one who knows.’ ”
They wanted the same basic configuration, with three-tiered landings and adjacent flower beds, but with uniform heights and widths. They wanted to reuse 100 per cent of the fieldstone on the retaining wall and flower beds, but preferred new stone for the capping and walkway surfaces. And they wanted to salvage most of the existing greenery, with some of it replanted in different locations.
Joe “believes very much in reusing what you can,” says Tuerr. “He took the shrubs and plants and everything else we had, and took them back to his shop and stored them there for the time they were working on the wall, and brought them back.”
They moved a Japanese maple away from the house, where it had blocked a window and tended to blend into the siding. Boterman also added more natural vegetation and grasses that Tuerr prefers, though not initially as much as she might want.
“It was hard for me to visualize” what Boterman had in mind, explains Tuerr, “so we said, ‘Let’s let this take until next year,’ and then he’s going to come back and see what else we need, what else we might want to put in.”
He brings the same attitude – let’s take this step, then make sure of it before taking the next – to his stonework.
“They dismantled each part of the wall and put it on skids as they had dismantled it,” says Tuerr. “They had two university students come and power wash them all off. Then, when they were putting the wall back together, they kind of used the stone as it had been.”
She appreciated the attention to detail. “When I saw him using the level on everything, I was quite pleased.” And they worked hard. “They did work often times through rain,” says Tuerr. “And they worked in excruciating heat. One week that we had 40-someodd degrees, they worked all day long and I felt terrible for them, but they were here.” The ‘they’ means Joe. “The job’s not being administered through a cellphone, with a group of employees,” explains Blott. Joe “has over 35 years of experience and everyday that experience is 100 per cent on that job.”