Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette photos Reclaimed stone gives a centuries-old look to the home builder Peter Perkins constructed for an unidentified owner in Buffalo, Butler County. Click photo for larger image.

Why do we like the feeling of stone? Maybe it's a throwback to cave-dwelling days when granite was not only your countertop but also your ceiling, floor and wallcovering.

Dan Wheeler has a theory, and he's so sure of it that he's built his business upon it:

"There's a desire in all of us to feel real things. It feels good to sit on a rock or rest your back against wood," says the Oil City man, owner of REALGOODS Co. and its subsidiaries, Real Sandstone and Real Hardwood.

Wheeler's main business is reclaiming barnstone, cobblestone and brick pavers from old houses, barns, bridge abutments and streets in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Beginning in 1999 as an architectural antiques dealer, he settled on stone two years ago because he found a demand for building blocks and pavers that don't look like they came from a quarry yesterday.

Peter Perkins sits on the front porch of the stone home he built in Butler County. Click photo for larger image. SOURCES: Angelo Gatto, stone mason: www.angelogatto.com In Ruins and DiLiscia Stone Contractors: 724-348-7733 Peter Perkins, builder: 412-767-5417 REALGOODS: 1-888-433-4443 or 814-354-6277, www.realsandstone.com, www.realhardwood.com Other REALGOODS products and prices: Granite cobblestone (Belgian block): $159 a ton, 20-ton minimum. Antique brick pavers: 74 cents each, 4,800-paver minimum (1 truckload) New hardwood flooring, unfinished: starts at 99 cents a square foot Handscraped walnut flooring, prefinished: $12 a square foot Old white oak barn flooring: $5.50-$6 a square foot

He found customers like Peter Perkins, a high-end home builder from Indiana Township. Or rather Perkins found him. A specialist in new houses that look old, Perkins built his own house 18 years ago with hand-cut sandstone salvaged from an old barn's foundation. Since then, he has built $1 million-plus homes and large additions with old stone, much of which he tracked down himself.

"Now that I have Dan, I don't have to spend my weekends knocking on doors at barns and farmhouses," Perkins said.

He recently tapped Wheeler for material to build a 4,500-square-foot stone and clapboard Georgian-style house in Buffalo, Butler County. The owners, who asked that their names not be used, had Perkins build a family room addition on their Fox Chapel house several years ago. This time, they wanted a dream house that looked a little like one they had seen in Southern Accents magazine and a lot like ones built here nearly two centuries ago.

"We wanted it to look like an early 1800s house that's been added onto," said the woman, a Massachusetts native.

"A deliveryman the other day said, 'It looks like you've added on,' " said her husband, who grew up in Fox Chapel.

"Music to my ears!" replied his wife.

The main part of the house has a roof made from reclaimed slate, a mix of arched and eight-over-eight double-hung windows and fluted columns on the front and side porches. A large wing resembles the clapboard additions often found on old stone farmhouses, with siding and a columned breezeway linking it to a matching two-car garage.

	The family room in the Perkins-built home in Buffalo features a stone fireplace and hand-hewn ceiling beams from an Amish barn. Click photo for larger image.

All of the exterior stone is picked-face sandstone from Ohio and Pennsylvania, Wheeler said. As its name suggests, the face of each block was dressed and shaped more than 100 years ago with a pickax. The other types of barnstone found in Wheeler's stone yard in Emlenton, Venango County, are rock-face -- rounded in the center and chipped out with a chisel -- and split-face, which was hand-split along the stone's grain. The barnstone ranges from sofa-sized behemoths weighing 1 ton each to 75-pound, loaf-sized blocks.

Wheeler also supplied barnstone for fireplaces in the house's living room and family room, which has a flagstone floor and 10-foot ceiling with hand-hewn beams from an 1840s Amish farmhouse near Volant.

To create the house's two-story, stone-walled entry hall, Perkins' masons used foundation stone from a mid-1800s house that had stood on the property. The woman of the house, a decorator, came up with the idea for rustic interior walls that look like the unadorned side of the house's stone exterior.

She and her husband marveled at the skill of masons Jim Saleone, Duane Leonburg and Frank Costanza, who carved out the backs of the largest stones used as quoins at the house's corners. They cut the rest of the barnstone into random-sized pieces to fill in the walls, using chisels to "age" the new edges.

Stone mason Angelo Gatto built this outdoor fireplace for Don Smith of Oil City with stone columns and hand-carved trim from St. Joseph's Church in Braddock. Click photo for larger image.

A pile of unused stone by the barn will be used as seating walls around the flagstone patio, the homeowners said. Altogether, Wheeler supplied about 80 tons of stone for the house. At $150-$220 a ton not including delivery, it adds up to a nearly $20,000 material bill. But the homeowners have no regrets.

When Wheeler complimented one of the owners on his new house, the man said, "Your stone helped make it that way. Hopefully, it will be standing long after we're gone."

That desire for permanence is also what drove Don Smith of Oil City, one of Wheeler's neighbors, to enlist his help and that of Nick DiLiscia of Finleyville on a patio/courtyard project. The L-shaped space, measuring 120 feet by 50 feet, features an outdoor fireplace and kitchen with an old slate roof and a stone wall of arched windows and ornate trim salvaged from St. Joseph's Church, which stood from the 1870s to the mid-1990s in Braddock.

DiLiscia, a fourth-generation stone mason, has a business called In Ruins that reuses stone from churches, bridge abutments and other structures. He provided several arches, a wall of arched windows and hand-carved stone cornice and columns used to build the outdoor fireplace. Wheeler provided rock-face sandstone and large decorative stone spheres, both from Ohio.

	In Ruins, a Finleyville business, installed these arched windows and wall, left, salvaged from St. Joseph's Church. Click photo for larger image.

After DiLiscia installed the wall with arches, Angelo Gatto of Franklin, Venango County, took over the masonry work, building the fireplace and other walls and adding carved decoration to the outdoor room that surrounds the frame Italianate house.

Smith, an orthopedic surgeon, spent nearly $50,000 on the 40 tons of Cleveland sandstone from St. Joseph's, which was used as is, of course.

"It's just like antiques. You don't want to clean it off," DeLiscia said.

Smith's project will also include a free-form pool, waterfalls and stamped-concrete patio.

"I didn't want it to look new," he said. "It had to have a patina about it."

He said the project, which will end up costing at least $200,000, wouldn't have been as elaborate if he had gone with new materials.

"The stone is the icing on the cake."