Blog

My name’s Tony Balfa. I have a business called Cajun Masonry in Elijay that I’ve had for 43 years, and I do anything out of brick, block, and stonework. I do block foundations, block buildings, brick houses, rock houses…I did this fireplace here years ago – about 8 years ago. Here in this subdivision they want them to look a hundred years old – the old look in the houses – and this is one of the very few subdivisions in Elijay that have nice, old antique-look houses here.

Okay, this is one of my fire pits I built out of old Tennessee rock. It’s called the Tennessee dry stat medium, and what’s unique about this fire pit is that it has holes on the bottom.

What happens is that it gets air – it adds oxygen to your fire here – and they claim that [the fires] burn a lot better when you have the holes around. We did arches and we did the cap, which is like 2 ½ inch Tennessee fill stone.

This is one of the old fireplaces here still standing in this subdivision, probably built a hundred years ago, and they called me to patch this. They got the rock from the land – they picked it from wherever on the land – and they used red clay, dirt, to build it. I can't believe it's still standing, but they want me to redo the whole fireplace.

This is the arch here, and these rocks fell out. What I do to fix these is I get a grout bag and I mix buff mortar-type mix. I fill the holes with mortar and then I start slowly taking some of the dirt out and replacing it at least two inches in with buff mortar, so we can save this. They want to save this but not tear it down – just patch it – and that's one of my projects coming up, is to make this where it won't fall down. And that's what I do. Anything in masonry I practically can do.