There were a few big milestones for the house today, although one of them was not a snow-covered picture.

• All of the wood floors are done.
• The house is locked up for the first time and has a lockbox.
• Their is trim around all of the windows and doors
• The kitchen and bathroom cabinets are underway

The downstairs bedroom looks big again. It looked big at the beginning, but then looked small when the walls went up. Now it looks big again. For the record, it is a big bedroom; 12.5′ wide and almost 20′ long.

The closet doors are swinging hinged doors instead of bi-fold doors or track doors. These match the bigger doors, they’re just narrower. For scale, the closet opening in the picture below is 48″, so the doors are 24″, and a normal door is 30″. This way, there are nice looking closet doors, but they don’t swing out too far. You can also see the beginnings of the bathroom cabinet through the door.

Upstairs the closets have the same doors, and the wood floors continue.

I don’t know why this picture turned out fuzzy (I’ll blame the phone), but I want to include it anyway because I’m convinced this nook will be the final selling pint for someone.  Instead of a closet, there is a cozysitting area, a window, and tons of light to the hallway and bedrooms. The nook continues around the corner for about 2′, so there’s room for a small desk or bookshelf and a chair.

The cabinets will be done this week. Stonework will start on both of the fireplaces on Wednesday. We also made final picks for the stain colors, including the cabinets, which will be a grey-ish stain. Exterior staining will be weather dependent, but we’re hoping to see that completed in the next two weeks. We also have the well diggers scheduled, which will check off a minor necessity.

Overall, it’s looking pretty good, and it definitely feels like a house now. Maybe there’s something to be said for having the ability to walk into a room and close the door behind you?

I also need to make a correction to my #shoplocal diatribe about the floors. It turns out that the floors are actually Ponderosa Pine, which is not from Blue Ridge. The upside is that it is a much harder wood than the local pine. However, the downside is that I lied, and the wood actually did make quite a trek on a truck to get to Georgia. So, apparently, I failed to FloorLocal, even though I did shop local!

We stopped by the house yesterday, and I’ll tell you what, I was absolutely floored. There was piles of wood everywhere!

Wood in the driveway…

Wood in front of the house…

And more wood on the porch…

On closer inspection, those piles of wood are 1×12 pine planks! In a matter of hours, Paul and his crew will turn those planks into floors for the entire house. 8 days ago, they were trees, and 6 days ago they were milled just 3 miles away.

Inside, the upstairs floors were almost done, and they were getting started on the living room.

The main upstairs bedroom has floors, and also has all of the walls closed in. The ceilings are the same as the downstairs bedroom and the walls are all 12″ log siding with the exception of two sections of board and batten that match what’s on the outside of the house and in the living room.

We decided to run the wood flooring through the entire house including the the kitchen and bathrooms.

The living room is completed enclosed now as well. Board and batten makes another appearance here around the upper window, the barn door bedroom, and the inside wall.

The new upper window adds a lot of light and also visually breaks up that wall. It’s good light for the living room and the barn door bedroom.

Next weekend, we’ll have pictures of the completed floor, door hardware, and the work-in-progress kitchen cabinets! There’s been a number of people through the house looking, so we’re hopeful that as it approaches completion someone will decide that it’s perfect for them!

With the exception of the staining, the exterior wood is done!

The mix of log, board and batten, and cedar shake turned out great. There’s cedar on the front, above the porch…

..and there’s cedar under the porch roof.

What you can’t see until you look closely is the crazy amount of wood trim that goes around every inch of the house. Paul and his crew did a bang up job, and it looks great all around.

The inside looks the same, except the tongue and groove is 99% done instead of 90%. We also picked the floors finally, and are going to use 12″ wide pine planks. It will be milled locally at the same place that milled all of the log siding. Most of the cabins we’ve seen in the area use a similar or identical floor, and we’ve liked the look of it every time we’ve seen it. It is softer than the oak floors that the builder suggested, but we think it is more consistent with the house. Since it is soft, in a few years it will have even more character! We also think it’s the ultimate version of #shoplocal; local trees milled locally, it doesn’t get any better than that! This is not floor on a boat from the far east.

…Until you’ve sold the house you’re currently building!

If you’re keeping up, you’ll know that we’re (somewhat) actively looking for what the next project will be. If you’re feeling lost, you can read about What’s Next and The Compound. What this really consists of going hiking every Saturday on random pieces of land followed by lunch in Blue Ridge (or Chik Fil A even though that is against #shoplocal). Usually, we find nice trees, an interesting view, and lots of thorns.

This week, with our special guest hiker, Alyssa Sista, we started out looking at some land that we saw before. I showed her where a house could go, some cool rocks, and then she ditched me while I went traipsing through the rocks and briar bushes. The girls were ready to go, but I insisted that we continue on and see if we could find anything else, so we decided to check out a 10 acre tract that’s been on the market for a while but that we’ve never looked at. After trekking/crawling/bouldering up a hill, over rocks, past some bears (I didn’t see them, but I know they were there), around the rattlesnake pit (they were sleeping underground), we came to the top of the waterfall we’d been following.

The stream went downhill for about 1000′ back to the road. It was steeper and wider towards the top, but was pretty impressive the whole way down.

Rocky and Alyssa wanted to pitch a tent and move in.

The exterior is almost complete! Paul and his crew were working hard today to get the last sections done.

There’s a small area of cedar shakes under the porch, which is the first color on the outside. This should look even better once everything is stained.

Inside, the new window adds tons of light to the living room.

The first floor bedroom is all wood now, which continues through the attached bathroom.

Even the laundry closet is wood!

To break up the horizontal wood, the vertical pattern goes all the way up the inside wall of the living room.

The vertical wood is also on the side of the steps, so that everything along that side of the room lines up.

The closet turned office is a cozy wooden nook now. For the 10th time, I’ll say that this was the best change that we’ve made during the whole build!

The main bedroom upstairs looks great. It’s the last room that’s not completely enclosed, as they’re using the ladder scaffold to reach the living room ceiling.

The new deck has a good view. Looking down the hill to the river isn’t bad.

Looking up isn’t so bad, either!

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.

We’re getting a bit of a deluge this weekend, so progress outside of the house is paused. The upside of all of the water is that the river is twice as wide as it normally is, so it’s more visible. It’s also good to see the driveway holding up nicely.

The porch roof and a good portion of the house roof are on. The roof appears to be mood changing, as it looks like a different color depending on the angle. I’m assuming that the rain had some impact, causing the roof to be more reflective than normal, and it’s reflecting those ugly grey things that are up in the sky dropping water on us. I think those come from Pittsburgh. Here we call them “clouds”, even though up there its just called “sky”. In the sun, up close, or dry, the roof appears much darker.

I actually was glad it was raining because that meant I could definitively answer the question you’re all wondering: “Isn’t the metal roof really loud?”. Answer: No.

Don’t ask me to explain that, but I stood on the porch in the pouring rain and the roof didn’t make any noise. I was hoping for some sort of quiet ‘ting ting’, but nope, nothing. The metal that was sitting on the trailer was making noise, though. I could give you a made up answer about roof pitch and the angle of the raindrop, but I’ll let you ponder that one on your own.

Inside, we’ve entered the age of Ben Franklin. The snakes start nice and neat…

Then they head all over the house.   

The kitchen is all set with overhead lights, plugs for the range, microwave, dishwasher, and refrigerator. There’s also a number of plugs for the counter for the coffee maker, crepe maker, toaster, waffle maker, keurig, and whatever else someone could think to put there. If you looked closely or zoomed in really far, you could see the notes on the wall of where everything is going.

No, you’re not going blind. There was really no way you were going to be able to read anything in that picture. It’s there though!

There’s also wiring for smoke detectors.

Of course, the closet-turned-office needed a plug too. I’m glad the electrician thought of this, because I didn’t!

Outside, there’s 2 lights on the porch (one over head, and one next to the doors), and another next to the front door. There’s also a couple of outside outlets, one on the side porch and one on the front porch.

We stopped “downtown” again. It was a little quieter than normal due to the rain and leaf season coming to an end. We finally made it into the L&L Beanery. It’s in an old bank building and was really similar to Iron Bank in Columbus. The one thing that Iron Bank definitely did better was leveraging the giant vault in the middle of the store, which they turned into a conference room with comfy chairs that anyone can use. L&L had some pictures and other miscellaneous stuff for sale in there, but I think it was a missed opportunity. For the record, there is not a Starbucks in Blue Ridge.

The train was parked downtown today, which was unusual. it’s usually away when we’re there, so either it was running late or we were running early. We’ve never ridden the train, although apparently it’s a scenic ride..