...and I forgot to mention...

That our bedroom below is so flippin' cold at -20C that our pillows FREEZE to the walls.  I could not make something like that up!  Serious frost forms inside the knee walls, and Eric surmises, based on his observations when he installed the Velux window, that our walls are totally under-insulated.  Why should our bedroom be any different than the rest of the upstairs, after all?  There might not even be any insulation in the knee walls, we're not quite sure.  Eric is threatening to tear all the drywall down to the studs and beef up the trusses like he did in the main part of our house upstairs, but first he's promised to finish the other bedrooms upstairs so we're not camping in our own house.

In the spirit of full-disclosure, I also forgot to mention one detail we did wrong when we varnished the floor:  the gap between the boards are about 3/16th" wide, and we used a latex-based silicone caulking to fill them.  If we were to do it again, we'd either not bother to fill the gaps at all, or we'd do it AFTER varnishing.  With time, the varnish has yellowed a bit, and although it's not obvious on the wood, it is more visible on the caulking.  The wood also contracts and expands, so the varnish has cracked over the caulking, and one day, when we're in the mood to refinish the entire floor, we'll probably painstakingly remove it all.

We'll see how we feel after the main part of the house is finished, and knowing Eric, I just know he's going to re-do the drywall and insulation in the master bedroom.  Well, the fact he's already bought the insulation is a dead give-a-way,  but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.