It’s no surprise there are heaps of decisions to make about our house. At the moment, it seems most of them involve wood.

A big pile of it arrived at our site this week: roof trusses and other bits to build our stick frame garage. The snowy show goes on, and John says it will likely be finished within a couple of weeks. It’s amazing to me that an entire structure (minus windows, doors, and siding) can exist out of nothing in such a short time.

I’m strangely comforted thinking about having a building to call our own again, no matter how uninhabitable it will be. It will give us a place to keep our snowshoes between treks around the point and we’ll be able to store a lot of materials there. This means we can start shopping!

And we have…

With timber samples, some pine we were considering for the ceiling, and plans in tow, we met Blayne from Prairie Barnwood on Saturday at his Winnipeg condo/showroom.

The main goal of this visit was to see the flooring we were pretty sure we wanted based on information John found online and unfinished samples we received in the mail. My gut told me this would be a successful meeting, and was it ever. As expected, we loved the flooring made out of varied reclaimed wood from Toronto Harbour. And we also fell in love with another option we didn’t anticipate – ash flooring made from Ontario barns.

The dark ash is very reminiscent of the flooring we had in our last house, which we both always said we’d be happy to have again. The ash we previously enjoyed was engineered, so it was pretty perfect. We find ourselves quite drawn to the imperfections of reclaimed wood – the nail marks, scrapes, and overall weathered look. The “green” aspect of it also feels good.

I’m not usually a very kinesthetic person, yet I couldn’t stop touching both flooring samples, kneeling on them, and wanting to walk around on them. I would have lied on them with a blanket if we knew Blayne better.

When I can’t decide between two sweaters, I often buy both. We’re headed in that direction with the flooring. At first we thought the way to have both would be to use the harbour wood in the bedrooms because it has a softer, lighter feel to it, and have the ash throughout the main areas of the house. That was until I suggested we use the ash throughout and the harbour wood on the ceiling…

That did it. Decisions made, along with the stain on our pine timbers (provincial brown it is). This is as long as the numbers crunch alright of course – we haven’t quite gotten that far.

My mind – I mean, our mind – is pretty much made up though. Since Saturday, I’ve been looking obsessively at the photos I took like I might revisit pictures of a new puppy before bringing her home.

Our conversation with Blayne also led to talk of reclaimed wood options for our basement and loft stairs, the loft floor/entryway ceiling, the barn door for our pantry, the mantle, and our trim. And that’s just the inside of the house. We’ll be using wood siding outside.

My shopping rule could really get us into trouble. Good thing we’re only building one house.