Our New Profiles Tool Makes Natural Stone Design Easy

Stone visualizer home design tool for natural stone

Online Design Tool Makes Choosing The Right Natural Stone Easy

READY TO GET INSPIRED?

The free online home design tool from Espinoza Stone brings your stone designs to life with just a few clicks.

Picking the right stone can be big challenge for homeowners and their designers. There is no standard name for many types of natural stone as every quarry, fabricator and yard uses different names for what can essentially be the same stone. When you add the wide variety of stone mixes that exist on the market, the stone selection process gets even more murky. Most stone design centers have small sample boards, tiny brochure pictures, sample walls or worse, chopped stone on pallets.

It’s just not easy for most folks to look at a pallet of chopped or thin veneer stone and visualize how it will look on their home.

Compare stone types and styles easily with your colors

Our Profiles® app helps you visualize different cuts and types of stone on your home. With a few clicks you can view our natural stone alongside a wide variety of paint, stucco and roof colors.  Our team has assembled a large natural stone catalog rendered from pictures of real stone. This makes it possible for you to get an accurate idea of how your stone selection will look alongside the paint, stucco and roof colors you like.

Online stone design tool visualizer

Customize your designs.

Use one of our 10 pre-loaded home elevations or upload your own rendering and drawings to get a realistic comparison of our different stone cuts and varieties. The goal is to increase your comfort level and make the stone selection process easier to visualize. The Profiles tool will keep track of every color and stone type you select for your design and allows you save your designs.

Profiles stone design visualizer

Give our Profiles tool a try.

Our Profiles© tool is live and can be found online at the Espinoza Stone website.  Get inspired, be creative and have fun bringing your stone designs to life.

Look Inside A Working Sandstone Quarry

Sandstone Quarry Block Loading

Inside a Texas Sandstone Quarry

I turned off Texas Highway 190 near San Saba, Texas onto a county road tightly framed by Juniper and scrub Live Oaks. That road quickly turned to a winding dirt road that led down to the Colorado River bottom.

Texas Sandstone Quarry Road

A few more twists and turns down the narrower dirt roads revealed the telltale signs of a working Sandstone quarry.  Dust rose over the piles of reddish rock and the sun glinted off metal sheds protecting stone saws and hydraulic choppers.

What’s Sandstone?

Sandstone is mainly composed of sand-size mineral or rock grains, most sandstone is primarily quartz and feldspar, which are two of the most common minerals in the earth’s crust. Like sand, it can be any color, but most commonly comes in tan, brown, yellow, red, gray and white.

The stone usually has a uniform texture and it is somewhat soft, making it user-friendly for a variety of applications. It is favored for wall claddings and flooring because of its low absorption rate, high compression strength, and pleasing appearance. Learn more about Sandstone’s properties and uses at the Building Stone Institute.

Into The Pit

Nerri, the quarry manager and a 12 year employee of Espinoza Stone, Inc., met me at the stone saws and drove me down to the beds where Sandstone slabs were being harvested. On the way to the active beds, Nerri stopped so I could take pictures of the stone layers exposed from previous Sandstone mining.

We walked down to a quarry wall where large amounts of soil and rock covering the Sandstone deposits were clearly visible. In mining terms, this layer is called the Overburden. Beneath the overburden, different layers of stone deposits were visible.

Sandstone Quarry Wall Showing Overburden

We walked down to an active quarry bed where a large loader was breaking out slabs of Red Sandstone. The loader seemed to lift the slabs out very easily.

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Sandstone is quarried differently from the Central Texas Limestone pits where large diamond-tipped blades saw checkerboard patterns into Limestone beds and excavators hammer the blocks free.

Back at the metal saw shed, two large stone saws sliced Sandstone slabs into pieces suitable for chopping.

Sandstone quarry saw

The chopped stone is moved to a staging area where the pieces are sorted by size, mixed, stacked on pallets and secured for transport. Flagstone pieces may be broken by hand in this area as well as separated again into ledgestone and patio stone pieces.

Chopped Sandstone

Semi trucks are loaded in the quarry for transport to building sites, distributors and further processing. Much of the stone produced from the San Saba mine will be mixed with Limestone and Leuders to create signature stone blends or thin veneer building stone.

Thanks for joining our walk through a Texas Sandstone Quarry and checking out our new blog.

Stay tuned for regular updates.