I had a professional Eldorado Stone installer come visit the house. If you can believe it, he wanted me to help him on his next job (I’m sure he was joking). He thought we did a really good job so far. Very clean. He was surprised when I said we hadn’t had to cut any of the stones to fit. Then he said that’s why it’s taken us 20 hours so far. He thought he’d be done in a day and a half, but he cuts the stones to fit. He mentioned that we really needed a scratch coat of mortar on the cement board, letting it setup for a bit before installing the stones. But the job is salvageable.
We are installing the stones in the “drystack” look, meaning the mortar is not supposed to show much between stones. That is supposed to be the hardest way to install this stuff. Normally, there’s plenty of mortar between the stones to hold it all together. It figures we’d go with the hardest install method on our first attempt.
So the verdict is we are going to fix a couple of the loose stones and continue with the installation. Not sure when though. If we have problems, we’ll call this guy back out. He’s not available for a while anyway. Seemed like a nice guy, he lives nearby and his daughter’s friend lives down the block from us.