A quick update

Some of you have emailed asking for an update on the move, sale of our old house, construction of our new home, etc...
Briefly, our old house officially went up for sale two weeks ago tomorrow - we have received an offer, and are currently going back and forth with the potential buyers... anyone who's ever sold or bought a house will appreciate how much fun that can be! But I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll end up with a successful deal. (Someone told me once that a successful deal is one where all parties end up just a little disappointed with the outcome...)
Since we plan to sell the house well before our new one is completed, we rented a small apartment and moved just enough furniture, clothes and the like to make it work. I also brought along my modeling desk, and am planning to spend some time working on bench projects until the new house is done.
Speaking of the new house, construction has officially started - the excavators were hard at work yesterday, and we've graduated from being the proud owners of an expensive pile of dirt and rocks to being the proud owners of a really big hole.

I don't know where all the extra dirt went and don't care. It was great to see progress after several months of planning, permits, prepping the old house for sale, and the like.
On the modeling front, I plan to work on several half-started projects, including some resin freight cars. I also dug out the parts for this mill building, which will be the first project I work on in the temporary modeling shop a.k.a. the apartment dining room.
Before we moved, I added indentions for nail heads to the clapboards, roughed the walls up, stained them, and gave them a coat of paint. I also painted a lot of windows. The first step was to dig all the pieces out of the shoebox they were stored in and make sure everything was still there! 

The basic process I used to finish the walls is common with builders of craftsman structure kits (Finescale Miniatures, South River Model Works and the like). Frankly, I've not tried to use these techniques in years - and I really don't have that much experience with them. I'm going for a "rundown, but not dilapidated" look - a building that definitely needs some TLC but isn't about to be condemned.
I'll let you be the judge. Here's a closeup of one of the walls:

Then I started staining and highlight painting the New England Brownstone stone wall castings - some of these will serve as the foundation walls, others I plan to use as part of the mill dam.