We replaced two window sills on a 1939 residence in the Leaside area of Toronto. The nice part of this job was recreating the margin tooled 45 degree corners on the stone that was evident in the original faux stone. This detail is found in a lot of earlier stone work around the city. If you look closely at our 19th century buildings in Toronto, you will see that roughly 1″ of the corners of the stone are worked to a sharp smooth finish. Back then, materials were expensive and labour was cheap. Therefore, we feel the tradesmen put maximum effort into making their materials look as aesthetically pleasing as possible. This detail is also referred to as a drafted margin. Recreating this detail is time consuming, but we feel it provides a sharp clean look to stone work.
The sills that we replaced were a convincing faux stone that was modelled off that early stone work. We used Indiana limestone to replace the sills. Indiana limestone is a soft sedimentary stone which makes it easy to work, but also tricky to install. Chipping corners is easy to do so extra precautions have to be taken to avoid making costly mistakes. We used a hand held grinder, chisels and a set square to shape the stone. We used a pozzolanic hydraulic lime mix to set the stone.