I have some stone that I am trying to identify. It was installed as an exterior veneer on a house in Alberta.
At the moment, there is about 90 square feet of the stuff in the basement (removed to enable some repairs). I would like to know what type of stone it is.
Below is a photo of a few representative pieces. After some reading online, my best guess is that it is either shale or slate. It is fissile and laminated and the larger pieces are about 1" thick and the smaller are closer to 3/4".
It was installed over steel mesh and mortar and would have been done in the late 80s.
I was initially leaning toward slate, because I didn't think that shale was commonly used for building exteriors. That said, the colouring does not seem right to me for it to be slate.
How would I go about identifying what type of stone this is?
Best Answer
Slate and shale are essentially the same thing, but slate is the "metamorphic" form, meaning it was shale, but changed into a DIFFERENT (more dense) form by eons of time and tons of pressure. So slate would not be fissile ("flaky") to the average expression of human force.
That's shale, aka "flagstone". People use it for siding and walkways, but usually in larger pieces. It might have value to someone, but people generally want it to match the color of something else (more shale / flagstone, house or landscape structure paint, etc.) so I wouldn't waste money buying an ad to try to sell it.