Visit Steve’s Place

Thanks for your interest in my house. I hope you enjoyed this little tour.

Any questions? Just send me an email at steve@stevemaxwell.ca

Welcome to my house! I’m happy to show you around. It’s a stone and timber place my wife and I began building in 1986. Except for a bit of hired labour, we built this place with our own hands, on a 90 acre piece of farmland and forest on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada. This project is where I get to use all my skills as a stonemason, carpenter and cabinetmaker, and various parts of the construction story have made it into my magazine and newspaper articles over the years. Scroll down to learn more about this project and how it has unfolded over the years.

On Christmas morning 1985, my Dad gave me a book about building with stone. I was 22 years old, and had just bought my piece of Manitoulin Island – a place where limestone bedrock pokes through the soil just enough to expose some beautiful, natural building material. This is a shot of that fateful book.

Dad’s little gift got me started with a lifetime of stonework that lays ahead of me. It seems crazy to most people that I would love such hard, slow work, but I do. It must be my Scottish roots.

I’m a purist, and that’s why I built a stone foundation underneath my stone house. Anything else would be cheating. This shot shows the partially completed basement in 1987. Walls are 24 inches thick, sitting directly on limestone bedrock that’s 6 feet below the surrounding surface. Total time collecting the stone and building the basement was about 3000 hours. I consider it my apprenticeship in the craft.

My house has a wooden frame – a combination of locally-cut white pine timbers coupled with 2x6 exterior walls.

This is the shed where my wife and I lived while we were building our house.

Above-ground stonework is all 9 inches thick, quarried and shaped by hand from local limestone outcroppings. The last of the stonework at the peak is about 30 feet off the ground.

I’ve done everything I can to build this house as cheaply as possible (out of pocket costs run about $35 per square foot), and this meant making flooring, trim and cabinets from locally-cut, rough lumber. Here’s a quick look at some interior details.