Fieldstone Basement Removal

Breaking the Wall

• Two types of fieldstone structures exist, dry and mortared. Dry fieldstone walls constitute those constructed without adhesive. Mortared fieldstone contains material like cement, which holds the wall together. Your basement constitutes the latter, as the former would collapse under stress from a home built on it. In order to pull down a stone-and-mortar wall, you need heavy-duty tools for breaking up the structure of the wall. Such tools include sledgehammers, chisels, club hammers, saber saws, drills with masonry bits and power saws designed for stonework. Always use extreme caution with these tools, and wear gloves, heavy boots and protective eyewear.

Removing the Fieldstone

• After you break up your old wall but before you start building your new wall, remove from your basement all the materials from the old wall. Always work one wall at a time -- talking them all down results in collapse. To make the removal process easy, use your tools to break stones and mortar into small, manageable pieces. Loading stones out of a large window or bulkhead door allows you to quickly and efficiently get the old stone out of your house. Wear something over your nose and mouth while doing this to avoid inhaling a lot of stone dust.

Weight Support

• Tearing down a fieldstone wall is easy. The difficult part of removing a fieldstone basement entails removing a load-bearing wall. The walls in your basement connect directly to, and may even form part of, the foundation of your home. These walls support the weight of your house. Removing them creates a number of risks. Before doing this, you must create structural support mechanisms throughout your basement, such as heavy beam structures to hold up floors above the basement. As you remove basement walls one at a time, you must create support for the other three walls so they don’t collapse from the added stress.

Professional vs. DIY

• Do-It-Yourself construction jobs always involve some degree of risk and require technical skill. However, something like building a shower stall requires a lot less technical know-how than taking out a basement. Unless you have extensive experience in construction or engineering, you should never attempt to remove any load-bearing wall, let alone a basement wall. Hire a local contractor to remove and replace your fieldstone basement for you. If you’re not sure about the course of action you want to take with your fieldstone basement, ask a local engineer or building inspector to take a look at your site and offer you advice. Always get price quotes from multiple contractors to find the best deal, and speak with former clients to ascertain the reputations of different builders.