Built-in

They've started the built-in shelving. You can just make out the wooden pegs running down the left side of the shelf frame in the first pic. Ed, at the The Speed of Wood, fashioned them to suggest the pins that hold our timbers together. Nice touch I thought. The full frame shot shows the TV area on the right of the fireplace. There will be one more shelf in between the base for the TV and the top. On the TV front, which might be of interest to you when you visit, we haven't decided what size TV we want to buy for the great room, but I don't expect it to be overly large in today's frame of reference. I looked at some of the enormous sets, and they are spectacular, but I'm still too cheap to fork over the thousands of dollars they want for them. It'll probably be a 52" set, maybe 60" if I weaken at the point of sale. Your guest bedroom and Ellen's bedroom will have an LCD TV in the 30-40" range most likely. I plan to reuse one of our old TVs in my bedroom, since I only use it to fall asleep while listening to the cable news chatter. Can't see worth a damn without my contact lenses anyway, so what's the point in buying an expensive TV? Looking at a high def TV with low def eyes makes no sense.