The exterior wood is about 75% done, so it’s starting to finally look like a real house. There will be cedar shakes on the gables with board and batten to mix up from 12″ chink siding that’s everywhere else. 

The “everywhere else” includes all the way up the left side from the basement to the roof, and also the entire back of the house.

Inside, there’s a ton of progress as well. The wood itself is almost all done. It will be quite a task to trim it out, but a big part of the work is done. Every interior surface, including floors, walls, and ceilings is wood. Even the bathrooms and closets. The downstairs half bath doesn’t feel overly large anymore now that it’s closed in:

The kitchen is all set as well. The picture doesn’t do it justice, but the ceilings are nice and high even in here:

Upstairs, the closet turned nook got it’s window finally, and I think this might be the best change we’ve made so far. The upstairs hallway is nice and bright now, and it will end up being a great place to work or read. It’s way better than having another closet.

While the downstairs bedroom is completely done, the upstairs room was in progress today. The ceilings are done, though, and look awesome. The same wood is is on the ceiling here and in the great room. The downstairs bedroom is 12″ log siding on the walls and beadboard on the ceiling.

the other room that’s done is the “barn door” bedroom.

The living room progress is visible from this room also. You can see the 12″ log siding on the back wall and 8″ wood on the ceiling. The vertical wood will run all the way up the left wall. This is the same as what’s in the hallway, so there’s consistency along the inside walls.

The other half of the living room is even further along. All that’s left over here is the stone fireplace!

Tim was making cuts in the living room based on the measurements called down by his two sons. Then, he’d pitch the boards up and they’d put them in place. They were working on the two upstairs bedroom closets this afternoon, which looked like the most tedious part of this stage. I think the progress is a lot quicker and easier when they’re just throwing down lengths of 12″ siding!

There were some big visual changes this week as the interior finishing got underway. The first sign of action is the piles of materials around the house.

Cedar shakes for the exterior.

Piles of T&G for the inside.

Trucks of 1×12!

The kitchen, coat closet, hall, and about 2/3 of the the living room are completed already.

Another big change is apparent as soon you walk in the front door. There’s a hole in the back of the house! Shortly, that hole will be filled with another set of french doors. French doors to nowhere, you ask? No, french doors to the new deck! 

The new deck wraps around from the back of the house to the porch, so now you can walk around the outside of the house form the front door to the new back door. It was a nearly universal question from everyone that visited the house: “why isn’t there a deck off of the porch?” Our rationale was that we could have a better view from inside of the house, and from the porch, if there was not a deck. With the deck built, you can not see the river from the porch because the deck is directly in the line of sight. I’m fully expecting someone to say, “I can’t see the river from the porch”, but hopefully the ability to walk out the back of the house onto the deck will offset that.

We also trekked down to the river, which was a bit perilous. We have not walked down recently, and the fresh leaves turned the hill into a slip and slide. We had quite a crew on hand today, including many of Rocky’s favorite people. He was a little bit jealous of the big sticks everyone picked up to walk down the hill with!

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Rocky, Brittany, Mom & Dad Katz, Alyssa, and Josh plotting where to put a firepit and beach chairs.

With the roof complete, and all of the wood on its way up, we’re approaching a large purchase of interior and exterior stain.

We’ll have one color for the exterior log and a trim color. The gutters are going to be black. We picked up samples of the leading contenders to see how they look on the wood.

The grey on top of these pictures is a piece of the roof. It varies from light grey to dark grey depending on the light and if’s wet or dry. The main outside stain would be chestnut, which is dark brown. It looks darker in this picture than it does in the catalog, and the catalog looks darker than the sample they had. We’re expecting it will be a lighter when we try it out.

The trim will be darker, although once again, not quite as dark as this picture. It will fall somewhere between the chestnut above and the black gutters. There’s not a lot of trim, but in combination with the gutters, should be a good offset to all of the lighter wood.

We also made the decision to eliminate the remaining sheetrock from the plan. Originally, there was going to be sheetrock in the two main bedrooms, the upstairs hallway, and the bathrooms. After looking at what else is being built in this price range, I convinced myself that it was worth the extra money to go with an all-wood interior.

I personally like this better than having a tiny amount of sheetrock, though we’ll have to use some different stains and wood patterns to make sure that it’s not overwhelming. The idea of having 3 sheetrock walls in 2 of the bedrooms didn’t seem right to me, so I think I’ll be a lot happier with the end product.

Roof and insulation are done. We picked colors for the outside wood stain and trim, which I’ll show later.

I forgot to take pictures of the inside. It looks the same, but is much quieter with the insulation.

The roof looks great! All of the exterior work will be happening this week, including the new deck.

The view from the deck is pretty nice in the morning:

The view from inside the house is even better. They took out 2 trees, which opened up the view a little bit more.