Interior ceiling finished

 The flooring was supposed to ship last week from Vermont, but we’ll see Tuesday if we can get confirmation of that. If so, we should have it by early the following week.  With the very strange winter - warm and no snow since Thanksgiving, we may get lucky and get it in the house without problems.  It’ll have to acclimate for several weeks with the low humidity here.  I’ll take moisture readings and we’ll lay it when they stop dropping.

In the meantime, all the shower floors are finally in and once we get more sealer, Sandra will finish grouting them.  We can begin tiling the walls after that.  In the main level ski/mudroom, I started putting up wainscot. 8’ on one wall where we’ll hang skis, and 6’ on an adjacent wall.  The wood is the grayed aspen we have been using in the living room.  It was laying on the floor and instead of having to move it when I sand this week, I am getting it up off the floor and onto the wall.  I think it’s going to look pretty good once it’s trimmed out.  

We have a lot of wood accent walls thoughout the house, and I think we have decided to use roughsawn 1x, again, grayed with the material from Canada.  Talked to the sawmill in Taos last week and they have plenty of Ponderosa pine logs to run the order.  I’ll head over tomorrow to get a sample to see how well it grays.

The cabinets arrived just before Christmas!  Thirteen pallets, some 10’ long, were delivered, and starting Christmas day, we started assembling them all, with help from our Houston daughter, who had placed the order, and who could explain which went where.  So- we put together nearly all of the boxes, complete with the face-frames.  Glued and nailed.  The color of the faces looked a bit light and silvery compared to what we were expecting, which was to be a more sable color.  But in our rush to get things assembled before she left, we just kept building. Then we pull out the doors and drawer fronts and - they they were the right color and did’t match the frames!  Apparently, the factory that made the frames forget the wash coat to create the sable color.  We are now waiting for the manufacturer to resolve the issue.  One of the possibilities is to send out complete replacements, another is to have them redone locally [not a good option], and the third, to remove the face-frames carefully and replace them with new ones.  I tried yesterday to remove a couple, and that can be done without damage to the boxes.  And it would be simpler than rebuilding all of the boxes and unloading another truck of material.  We’ll get this resolved in the coming week but it has set us back some.