Wow, have things ever been busy! Things on our house are rocketing along, but the ride hasn't exactly been smooth lately.

If I can give any of your advice on building your new home, with Bay West or with anyone else, it's this: extra sheets are what build your house. It's not the contractors, the salespeople, the site managers, or anyone else. It doesn't matter who you talk to, what you ask, or how many smiles and handshakes you might get from the builder. None of that matters: if it's not on an extra sheet, it doesn't get added to your house. We're now learning this the painful way....

I'm frustrated with myself because I KNEW this. When I was building the condo I'm currently in, exactly the same thing happened. I went and met with the salesperson, told him what I wanted (at the time it was a specific pattern of cable/telephone/power jacks for my office room), and he smiled as he scribbled it down on a piece of paper, got me to draw what I wanted, and said "Sure!". No problem, I thought, the nice salesperson will pass the information along to the guys who are actually building my condo, and it will get done. Well guess what happened? When I finally moved in a couple of months later, I find that the cable and telephone jacks are all wrong - they never did what I asked. When I confronted the salesperson, he said "I don't have any record of that". Sure enough, he had lost the piece of paper where I outlined what I wanted. I never asked for a copy of it (mistake #1), I never saw it transferred onto an actual extra sheet (mistake #2), and trusted that he would care as much about the details in my condo as I did (mistake #3). After I moved into the condo I tried to get it changed, but ultimately it came down to being "no one's fault" because I couldn't prove that I requested the changes, and the salesman couldn't find the piece of paper with the details on it.

And now, here we are again, same scenario. From the very beginning of this house purchase, I've been telling Kimerie and Shelly that I wanted to develop the basement, and therefore needed roughed-in plumbing for a half-bath, an extra heat vent added to the basement, and all the heat vents brought from the ceiling to the floor. Considering that hot air rises, it seems rather odd to place basement vents on the ceiling, wouldn't you say? At any rate, these things were discussed numerous times from the beginning. They were on a pricing sheet we got in July, but somehow they didn't make it onto an extra sheet, and I didn't realize it until I saw the house. AUGH! Imagine my shock and dismay as I looked up and saw them in the basement ceiling instead of on the floor like I wanted them to be. Very frustrating.

What's strange is that 100% of the rest of the items on the pricing sheet made it onto extra sheets, except for the roughed-in plumbing, and the heating vent issue mentioned above. So we got most of the extras we wanted, but somehow these three things slipped through the cracks.

So once again, accurate extra sheets are the single most critical element in building your new house. Possibly more important than getting your mortgage. ;-)