In the spring of 1991 a childhood dream came out of Curt Christman's mind and became a reality. Lewis County Monuments was started and in 2007 the name was changed to North County Memorials Inc. to better facilitate the current vision of serving Northern Ny. Currently Curt and eldest son Christian are in partnership operating the monument business. This small business has endured the ups and downs that all businesses encounter. Come along and enjoy the ride!!
Wow...I can't even imagine charging that much for a cleaning. I do it for free with Dawn dish soap and water and plastic putty knives and plastic brushes (hard or soft depending on the stone). I use an awesome Ortho pump sprayer for the solution and it works better than my Ryobi 18V one. I also invested in some plastic picks to get inside the lettering. So all total it costs about 50 cents to do a stone at the most. The ones in your video takes about half an hour to clean. I'm working on one that's 5' tall and 4' wide of rough cut marble and so far have about 2 hours of labor invested. I would like to clean the entire cemetery but it's about 3,000 stones or so. I also refurbish old cemeteries and have worked on one that's 225 years old, most of the "headstones" are rock markers.
I have only been at this game for two years now, and it is going very well for me. My actual has been better than my project on my business plan and I am doing well. I am right in that first growing pain. I do everything alone and am at the point where I am hustling to do it all. I do 100% of my fabrication and sub out nothing, I am finding that a lot of other larger companies do sub-out work. My question to you is, do you do all your own fabrication work or do you utilize some of the quarries fabricators for some stones? I am trying to figure out if I am going to start to subcontract some fabrication or if I am going to look into hiring someone that has experience in fabrication or the ability for me to train to help with some of the in-house fabrication work.
We had the first case. Stone was in stock, we came with a final design in hand, monument folks fit us in easily. Got our monument in three days. Got the monument set at the site before the service. Learned a lot watching your videos.
Man we have always got some kind of issue with a stone. Even the inscriptions we can take a while to get to. A big thing we've been dealing with is the quarries not shipping us what they say they are we've had shipments with 15-20 stones that don't match the manifest
This one hits home! It's always something. I feel like this hits every monument shop in every state and every city across the country. Hope the rest of your year is nice and smooth. Cheers
Help Christian pass up his big sister subscribe to his channel here... thanks!! Besides these guys are the best!!! Take care guys keep making monuments!!!
Speaking of “adding water”… As I research my new interest in sandblasting, I see a lot of info on vapor blasting. Have you guys ever tried vapor on headstones, and if so, how does it compare to dry blasting stone?
Great update. You guys are always innovating! One thing I've not seen on your channel is how to embed a flat ground granite marker into cement to make it flush, which I see in many cemeteries. Can you address that sometime? Keep up the good work!
Most of the time the cemetery does this work but I can show it if we do it sometime. They just poor the pad 4 inches below grade then fill in around the stone once it's placed.
@@TommyTester the cemeteries where we are here in Colorado have gone away from setting in concrete. For that look we frost a border and verve inside that border, when you set it, it looks like it’s set in concrete. That’s how the cemetery wants it, not us.
We use set rite. We roll up a small roll and lay on edge of picture and when we push the picture in place it squeezes out and we trim it with a knife comes out super clean looking.
Wow. There’s no way anyone around here would pay those prices. Living out in the mountains of Arkansas most will end up doing it on their own if the price is that high since they too can research ways to clean these stones. I can’t charge anywhere near that unless I’m restoring a headstone where Akepox is being used and there is a lot of damage. A majority of all our older stones here are all marble and after around 1870-present they are pretty close to being wiped out unless they’re not facing the same direction as the elements.
Upstate NY here and I use Dawn dish soap and water. The difference is amazing. AND the best time to clean them is in a rainstorm...stuff peels right off of them!! Always use plastic scrapers and brushes to prevent damage.
Thin blue fine line vinyl tape, the same tape that is used in auto body shops. It comes in different sizes. The tape is very flexible. Then mask around the blue tape, caulk, use just water on your finger and smooth out.
Great video👍. Hint for lining up end dates if you have the original file with birth date - cut a full stencil with both dates and simply line up the birth date over the existing engraving and mask up accordingly 😊.
I have a granite headstone that was sold to me as an ex display with a single chip on the base stone. After it was installed and letters coloured in I seen that some of the gold colour couldn't be cleaned off. The funeral director who sold it to me ran a mile. I have found about 500 pits in the granite, no other headstone in the graveyard has this problem. Can anything be done to rectify this?? Obviously it was a seconds unit and that's why it was selected as a display unit. I paid 2k for it. Savings 1500 on a new one. Thank you.
Always interesting to see how things are done in different areas. Down here in the Deep South double processing is rarely done. We shape carve everything except flat markers. And for sure our foundations don’t have to be anywhere as deep as y’all’s (praise God).
We feel incredibly lucky to have met you unexpectedly and to have such a strong bond of trust. Our father would like to express his gratitude for the beautiful and top-notch tombstone you created for him. It seems like fate brought us together, as the Chinese proverb goes: it took 500 glances in a past life to cross paths in this one. We are more than happy to keep looking back on this moment for eternity. The truth remains timeless, whether in ancient times or today.
