A Stone Guy Rebuilds His Backyard: Four Projects, One Year, and a $20,000 Slab

Most weekend projects do not double as a tool test. This one did. Over roughly a year, Adam Tompkins rebuilt his Arizona backyard around a single idea, mixing wood and stone, and used stone fabrication tools for nearly every step of it. Four projects: a tree stump table, a round granite dining table, a rebuilt BBQ, and a bar topped with a petrified wood slab worth more than most cars.

We asked to publish his build notes because they are full of the kind of specifics that do not make it into product catalogs: which blade cuts quartzite without a fight, why the wrong glue fails outdoors, and what leathering a slab actually involves. If you fabricate for a living, most of this transfers directly to work you get paid for.

Project 1: The stump table

Where the whole theme started

A crew was cutting down a tree across the street. Adam saw the stump and thought it would make a good base for an exotic piece of stone. That single idea, wood paired with stone, ended up driving the entire backyard.

Grinding wood with a stone tool

The stump came into the yard much heavier than expected, and the top and bottom needed to be flat and level. Here is the leap: if a carbide blade cuts wood, why would a carbide or PCD cup wheel not grind it?

It works, and it works well. That is a genuinely useful thing to know if you already own the tool for concrete and stone work.

Cutting the top to match the base

He traced the top of the stump, then went out 4 inches all the way around, so the stone top would echo the irregular shape of the wood rather than fight it.

The slab is quartzite, which is harder than granite. The rough cutout was done with a Zenesis Z Max blade, the go-to for extremely hard stone, and it went through the piece without drama. The curves came from a Type 29 brazed cup with a spring arbor, which Adam rates as a new favorite because it handles stone, concrete and metal equally well. Its curved edge did what no flat cup could.

Distressed stone, not distressed wood

The finish is the interesting part. Adam wanted the stone equivalent of distressed wood, which meant removing a highly polished factory surface and rebuilding the texture from scratch.

Once the surface was raw, he moved to antiquing and leathering brushes and worked up through eight grits: 24, 36, 60, 120, 240, 320, 500 and 1000.

The technique note here is the one most people miss, in his words: leathering stone is as much an erosion process as a polishing process. The coarsest grit sets the depth of the texture. Every grit after that adds detail and pulls out color. If you set your depth wrong at 24, no amount of fine work fixes it later.

Project 2: The round dining table

Same theme, bigger piece

Next was an outdoor dining table, again mixing wood and stone.

Cutting a circle in granite

Adam used a contour turbo blade for the round top, with a note aimed squarely at the trade: he cannot believe some fabricators still cut circles with straight blades.

The clever part is his setup. A mentor gave him a set of bearings that, mounted between his work base and the bottom of the stone, turn the whole thing into a vertical lathe. The grinder spins the stone, and perfect round tops get made by hand. He demonstrated the technique in a video from an earlier chapter of his career, which you can watch here.

Flattening flagstone the fast way

The tree trunk alone would not carry a heavy granite top, so the base became a piece of sandstone flagstone. Flagstone is naturally uneven, and both faces needed to be flat.

He used a TST Photon G blade for this, cutting sideways into the stone rather than grinding all the way down to the lowest point of the piece. On an uneven natural stone, that is a large time saver.

Holes, hogging and glue

He made a template of the trunk so holes could be drilled through both the wood and the stone, then used Zenesis thin wall and Obsidian bits to countersink them. The countersinks matter: they let the stone sit flat on the ground and the trunk sit flat on the base.

To hog the top of the trunk flat, he used a grinder attachment that turns the tool into a chainsaw, which he cheerfully calls probably the most dangerous grinder blade ever made. An old patio table became the underlayment for the granite top, and AB epoxy tied everything together.

Project 3: The BBQ rebuild

Losing a tree, gaining a centerpiece

Last summer a tree died in the extreme heat, which as Adam puts it is life in the Arizona desert. Removing it opened a space, and that space became a new BBQ and the centerpiece of the yard.

He had built the original BBQ years earlier on the side of the house where nobody could see it. Rather than buy new block, he cut the old one apart block by block and moved it.

One tool, two jobs

The TST 6 inch Photon G cut and grind blade did the salvage work. The cutting edge went through the old mortar, in his description, like a hot knife through warm butter, and then the face of the same blade ground the leftover mortar off each block.

That back and forth is the whole point. Having a diamond blade and a diamond cup wheel in one tool means no swapping between cutting and cleaning, which on a job with dozens of blocks adds up fast. Adam calls it probably his favorite blade in the line.

For the clay brick around the footings, a TS400 tile saw with a 10 inch Zenesis Z Pattern blade cut fast and clean. Toby the dog was reportedly unmoved by any of this and mainly wanted someone to throw a ball.

Block laying, honestly assessed

The hardest part of block work is getting every block flat and level, layer by layer. Adam is direct about it: he is a stone guy, not a bricklayer. Despite his best effort, the top layer still needed grinding to be truly flat corner to corner, and he used a Diamond X Type 29 with spring for that. He also admits to grinding the vertical faces smooth before painting, which is not textbook but is honest.

The glue lesson

The top is a quartzite called Bronzo in a rustic leathered finish, chosen to match the tone of the rest of the yard. Quartzite is harder than granite, which is exactly why dedicated blades exist for it. The Zenesis Z Max on his rail saw cut it like ordinary stone, with clean results. His verdict: the Z Max is the best turbo blade on the market for engineered stone, granite and quartzite, and version 2 is now available.

For the seams he used a polyurethane developed by Paul Klees at TST, mixed with dust collected while cutting the stone. That is the old school way to get glue to match the material exactly at the seam.

The top edge got a 3/8 inch radius from a grinder router bit. For finishing, he used only the number 1 pad of the TST 3 step dry pads to sand the edges, which matched the color and tone of the leathered surface rather than polishing it to a shine it was never supposed to have.

Project 4: The bar

The once in a lifetime piece

A former customer and friend who does very high end stone work gave Adam a couple of semi precious remnants. These come from Antolini in Italy and run over $20,000 per slab. One is petrified wood, the other is built from stone agates.

For scale: another friend built a bathroom vanity from semi precious stone and charged $35,000 for it. A full kitchen runs north of $200,000. Adam got the remnant from that vanity job and turned it into a piece for Christelle plus a lazy susan for the kitchen.

The petrified wood slab became the bar top, and he used nearly every inch of it.

Cutting something harder than quartzite

Petrified wood is harder to cut than quartzite and brittle on top of that. The little cutting required was done with a Zenesis Nano Dry blade on a Makita grinder, and the sides were squared and flattened with Zenesis resin filled cup wheels.

How these slabs are actually made

This is the part most fabricators never see. Adam has been to the factory and watched it happen.

A semi precious slab is man made. The petrified wood trunk is sliced into 2cm pieces, and as many full size trunk slices as will fit are laid onto a table with borders. The gaps get filled with smaller pieces and epoxy resin troweled in between. Once cured, the slab goes onto a polishing machine to be calibrated and polished.

The practical consequence: the exposed edge is full of epoxy and does not polish well. That is why most fabricators mitre the edge so it matches the top. Adam went a different direction and wrapped the outer edge in stained oak, which kept the wood and stone theme running through the last project. The stone was set to a cement board subdeck with 100 percent silicone, and the mitered wood trim was glued the same way.

Then, as he tells it, step three was to have a BBQ with his wife and his friend David Bonasera, one of the best stone restoration people in the world, who happened to be in town shooting a video on quartz repairs.

Five things worth stealing

Pulled out of four projects, these are the notes that transfer to paid work.

1. A stone tool is often a wood tool

A carbide or PCD cup wheel flattens a tree stump as happily as it grinds concrete. Before buying something single purpose, check whether a tool already in the van does the job.

2. Cut and grind on one blade saves real time

On demolition and salvage work especially, a blade that cuts with the edge and grinds with the face removes dozens of tool changes from a day.

3. Leathering is erosion, not polishing

Set your texture depth with the coarsest grit. Everything after that adds detail and color. Starting too fine means you never get the depth you wanted.

4. Outdoor seams need UV stable glue

Polyester and epoxy fail outdoors, no matter how good the joint looks on day one. Use an outdoor-rated polyurethane, and mix in dust from the cut for an invisible color match.

5. Match the blade to the material, not to the price

Quartzite, porcelain and petrified wood each punish a general purpose blade. The right blade turns a fight into an ordinary cut, which shows up in both cycle time and blade life.

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