Since I know everyone loved yesterday’s quick quiz, let’s try again. How would you describe the colors in the picture below?

• Purple and White
• Grey and Brown

Now back to the matter at hand. Over the past year, we’ve come to learn that, in Blue Ridge, everything. Happens. Very. Slowly. I think everyone must have either a “I’m on lake time” or a “I’m on cabin time” sign in their house, because nothing moves quickly. Nothing, that is, except the Terra Outfitters renovations.

As of this afternoon, half of the floor was already in. Handscraped wood floors look awesome, feel awesome underfoot, and fit perfectly with the atmosphere we’re trying to create. We were very fortunate that the old carpet came up easily, and the floor underneath was in decent shape. That made it a lot faster to get the new floor installed, and prevented us from having to do any repair work on the subfloor.

All of the framing is done, and the fitting room walls have been sheetrocked and barnwooded. The doors to both fitting rooms will be made out of the same wood that’s on the walls. It’s old barnwood that was replaned. Everything will trimmed with it also. This time, the wood really is local, I promise. That wall looks short, but it’s 6′ long. Actually, the entire picture is an optical illusion. The back wall runs 9′ between the two perpendicular walls, and both fitting room walls are 6′ long.

Each long wall has several 8-10″ sections of barnwood. The original idea was to just have a couple of sections of wood for accents, but it’s progressed into covering the majority of the walls, with the painted portions being the accents instead. The early feedback has been really positive, although apparently the walls appear purple, not grey.

It’s been over a week since we’ve posted any house updates. There’s a reason for this, but let’s first play a little quiz game to make up for the lack of pictures this week. Which of the following is the reason we’ve been absentee bloggers?

• David has had crazy work travel the last two weeks
• The internet doesn’t work in Georgia when it’s below freezing
• Brittany interpreted 3 “snow days” to mean 3 days completely off. From everything.
• We spent all of our free time writing orders for the store
• We were under contract on the house but within due diligence period

I know, I know, this is tricky stuff, and we didn’t tell you there was going to be a test. The reality is, last Thursday (2/19), we negotiated a contract on the house. Over the past 12 days, we’ve worked out a few details, but having been on both sides of deals that haven’t worked out before, we decided to keep quiet. Today, we received a non refundable deposit on the house that is significant enough that we now feel the deal is extremely unlikely to fall apart, as it would be extremely costly for the buyers to break the contract. After the closing, we’ll provide a bit more detail on what we agreed to do, and the things we learned about being a builder-seller. For now, it’s sufficient to say that any decisions made about the house from here on out are not ours.

The changes depart a bit from what we had in mind for the finished product, so it’s somewhat hard to have gotten so close to seeing the full vision completed to now having it altered, but we knew that it could happen. We’re also feeling fortunate that the timing will allow us to close on the house before the store opens and also opens up the possibility of getting into another house to actually live in without getting into another place that we know is temporary (again).

The closing date is set for 4/17, which will be 11 months from when we purchased the land, which isn’t too bad for the first go-round. It will also result in a modest profit, which for a first trip through the process is a great outcome. Hopefully, the next few weeks won’t be too interesting to read about!