House progress: cabinets, roof; blue chanterelles

Builtins! The downstairs cabinets will be Brazilian Cherry and the upstairs will be Knotty Alder for a more rustic appearance (and to save a bit of money).

The kitchen, viewed from the family room ^.
Family room ^ We will put a TV on the left side, haven't decided what we want to do on the right side so for now it's open.
Utility room ^. The cabinets will have an easy-to-clean laminate rather than wood.


The house is now (mostly) waterproof -- the shingles are all on, as you can in the above photo. The "mostly" part refers to the chimney -- there isn't any roofing over that part of the house, so a bit of water can still get in. I'm tempted to cover it with plastic, like our contractor did for the skylights. The roof looks sort of dark in this photo because it's wet. Also, the garage is ready for the concrete -- it will be poured tomorrow.

We're working on getting the exterior doors, too. We found a local source of Craftsman style wood doors for a very good price so we're going to go with nice stain-grade fir for the front entry and back door. The utility room and garage doors will either be fiberglass or steel.

One interesting aspect of the house design revealed itself when I was trying to find transoms to go over the front and back doors. The rough-in widths don't work for the standard off-the-shelf transoms. 3 feet is too narrow for the front and too wide for the back; and 6 feet is too wide for the front. It's starting to look like we will have to get something custom-made for us if we want transoms....

And now for something completely different: a "plate shot" showing a dinner we had recently, featuring blue chanterelles (Polyzoellus Multiplex) and winter squash harvested from our garden: