SMART LIVING
Spruce up Your Backyard
Bailey Stone Company and Installations has what you need for outdoor projects large and small.

By Mary Ellen Stancill

This time of year, neighbors that have been hibernating all winter are outside and working hard—which gets you thinking about all of your own projects for the warm-weathered days. If your plans involve natural stone, skip the trip to one of the big box retailers. A visit to an Alabama stone company and quarry is a fun-filled adventure. Just a few miles north of Oneonta on State Highway 75, you’ll find Bailey Stone Company and Installations. After the covered the bridge on your left, you’ll top a hill and see the rainbow-colored palettes of sawed and broken stone. Pull into the driveway and up to the office—made of stone, of course—and you can bet Owner Bill Bailey will be there, ready to help get your project going.

For 58 years, three generations of the Bailey family in Oneonta have been quarrying, selling, delivering and now installing natural stone. Customers throughout the southeast know that the Baileys will help them select the right stone for their commercial or residential projects—from a few stepping stones to a brand new church building. They’ll send you back with what you need, deliver the stone to your house or deliver and install it all for you.
With growth in the landscaping business and plenty of new residential construction throughout the last decade, the Baileys have seen their business grow from a small operation to one that currently employees about 30 people. Owner Bill Bailey proudly leads the company, started by his grandfather and expanded by his father and uncle. “We try to do as much with the stone as we can: break it, saw it, deliver it, wash it, install it,” says Bailey. We recently sat down with Bill to learn more about the stone found right here in the hills of Alabama and how we can use it in our home projects. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Bailey Stone Company has been in business since 1950. Tell me how it has changed over the years.
A: Used to, we would work a quarry, sell the stone from the quarry and deliver the stone. We’ve since bought another quarry, so we own two quarries. So we’ve gone from one quarry to two quarries. We’ve gone from sales and deliveries to installations. So now, we’re getting it out of the ground, we sell it, we deliver it and we install it.

Q: How do you get the rocks out of the
quarry?
A: We use Bobcats and track hoes and loaders, so we clean off a spot and get all the dirt away from the stone and then we’ll shoot it.

Q: What do you mean by shoot it?
A: Like Atlas Blasting in Birmingham, they’ll drill a hole, put dynamite in it and then bust it which means it’ll shake the layers loose and we can work it with Bobcat force and separate the pieces and that’s called the quarrying process. From a shot of dynamite, you work so many feet and then you’ll work back to where the layers are tight again and you can’t get the stone out of the wall, so you shoot it again. And a shot will last, however many holes you do will last five or six months. Then you’ll do it again. It’s just a process.

Q: And then once you’ve done the actual quarrying then, you divide it by hand?
A: Yes. And then dividing it by hand, it’s cut or broken here [points to a barn] and then after that it goes out here [points to the stock area]. In the quarry guys are stacking up slabs for cutting. They’re stacking flagstone and then they’ll bring it up on the truck. We’ll take it off, we’ll weigh it on a scale and then we’ll stock it. So this is stock areas and you come in and say, “Hey I need one-inch flagstone.” Well, we know where to go or send you. We send you with a price list. You know what it costs. We talk about what it covers then you go from there.

Q: How many different types of stone do you sell?
A: We have 45 different items. We sell stone from several different states: North Carolina stone, Georgia stone, Tennessee stone, Pennsylvania stone and our local stone.

Q: What type of stone is the local stone?
A: Sandstone. That’s from the local quarry.

Q: Are there different types of sandstone and colors?
A: There are several colors of earth tone and several different colors of blue/gray. In a quarry there’s a blue section and a brown section. And the brown may be pink, beige, tan. The blue may be gray, light gray, dark gray and then as they meet, the blues and grays, you’ll get a lot of mixture and they overlap and it makes a pretty color. So, you have blue, brown or both.

Q: What are your most popular stones?
A: Flagstone. It comes from the sandstone quarry and it’s like a patio stone. Something for walking on, patios, pool decks, walkways, stepping stones. That’s our most popular item.

Q: When you drive up and see all the stone sorted out in front. Does that stone have a place it’s going?
A: No, it’s just there for the picking. It’s just stock. We itemize each item and number it. So then you come in for a concern and we lead you towards the item.

Q: Do you have many customers that just pull up?
A: Yes.

Q: How do you help them select the stone for a particular project?
A: We use pictures. Say you come in and you say this place is washing out beside my house and I want to build a patio. I say OK we’ll build a patio, and I’ll show you the different colors that you can use. Are you going to mortar the joints or lay stepping stones? I’ll try to pinpoint what your needs are. Then from there, I’ll say well how big is your area? A lot of people don’t know and they’ll go home and they’ll call and say, 20 by 10 [feet]. Well I know that’s 120 square feet and I know so-and-so material covers so many feet per ton. Everything here is sold by the ton. So, then I’ll give people a ball park price. If you come in and we say, I want to do something around my pool, what are my options? Then we’ll go to the job site and we’ll lay samples. They’ll say I don’t know? What goes with my house? Well I’ll go do a little area, blue and brown, let the customer look at it and then we’ll go from there.

Q: Can you do any size job? If someone wants three stepping stones, will you sell them three stepping stones?
A: Oh yeah. [People will say], “I’ve got a ditch going from my driveway to my front steps or we sell one rock. We will sell one stone or one acre’s worth of stone.

Q: Tell me about the different sizes of stocked stone.
A: We keep all of this consistently the same, there’s a two inch, an inch and a half and a one inch. So, it comes out of the ground in three different thicknesses. Anything over two inches, three four or five inches all the way up to, sometimes it gets three-feet thick. There’s a need for everything. Everything is usable even down to something that’s this size [points to a 1/2-inch-thick piece of stone]. The 1/2 inch is used as a decorative stick on, say you’ve got a pool deck that’s cracked or you can just stick it to a wall like this.

Q: If the stone around here is sandstone, what types of stone do you get from other states?
A: Slates.

Q: Is there a reason to pick sandstone over slate stone?
A: Sandstone is smoother and slate is kind of jagged but it comes down to color. Some colors you can’t get but here. So you couldn’t get Alabama colored stone in North Carolina or somewhere like that.

Q: What’s your favorite part of your job?
A: My favorite part is meeting the customer, making a sale or doing the installation and that customer leaving happy. That’s the reward I get from this business. It’s just like when I was teaching ... my reward teaching was little Johnny comes back 10 years later and says, “I had you in eighth grade and I appreciate what you did for me.” So, going back to the stone business, it’s, “Hey, I still like that patio. I appreciate you doing that for me. I appreciate you doing it right. I appreciate you saying you were going to do this and you did this. I’m going to tell so-and-so about you.”

Contact Bailey Stone Company and Installations, LLC 205-274-2076,
baileystoneco.com or 84 Solomon Rd. in Oneonta.




November Birmingham, Alabama

  

 
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