It's been a little over two years since our last post to this site, but I wanted to officially close it down with some thoughts about our home and what we might have done differently. All in all, we're still very happy with our home and feel Bay West was a decent builder. I use the word decent because, as anyone that read this blog knows, we had issue after issue with Bay West and getting things the way we wanted was difficult. Yet, in comparison to other horror stories we heard about other builders delivering homes months late, our issues with Bay West fall into the "minor" category. Would we build with Bay West again? Yes - but we'd be more aware of the pitfalls in building a house and stay on top of the paperwork better. That's assuming, of course, that Bay West would build a home for us again and wouldn't hold a grudge because of this blog. ;-)

There are certainly things we would have done differently with our house: we would have preferred stucco and more stonework on our house instead of the vinyl siding and wood work we have now. White was just a bad colour choice - it shows dirt too easily. We would have had our basement finished at the time of construction - it was a hassle to do it all after the fact, and we ended up going through a second revision after only a couple of years. We re-did the my office in 2005, removing the berber carpet we had (which a then-puppy Keiko made quite a mess of), and put in place hardwood laminate which is excellent as an office floor. We also had some custom wall cabinets built, which provide a huge amount of storage. Lastly, we would have expanded the square footage of our house a bit here and there, including building a larger deck. Lessons learned.

And with that, I'm officially putting the Building with Bay West blog into a permanent archival state. Until next time we build!

Now that we've been in the house for a little over two years, we've learned a few things. The first is that two years wasn't enough time for our house to settle. The walkway below was created by a company named FT Landscaping. They did a good job, and the framework is secured to the foundation of the house. Much to their surprise, and ours, a few months after they did the work, the stonework started to collapse, and now we have what you see here:



Neither of us knew that would happen, so I don't blame them for it. In retrospect we should have waited longer, but two years sure seemed like a long time!

The other thing we've learned: never buy a white house. White shows everything, and our house has been a dirty shade of white since we moved it. We just got the house pressure washed the other day, and it looks much better. In retrospect, we should have gone for beige siding - something that doesn't show every speck of dust.

Live and learn - that's what this Web site is about. :-)

Things appear to be getting closer to the finish line - we had a meeting with Burt Pelletier, a site supervisor for Bay West. He's a friendly and honest guy that told us he'd make sure things got taken care of, and so far things are getting done. We have an appointment booked this week for the drywallers to come out and fix a crack in the wall. Burt also told us that he'd get our microwave lowered and instead of replacing the cabinets with longer ones (which would be messy), he'd get a piece of wood put in above the microwave that would cover up the space. Sounds good to us! The railings and deck painting will also be addressed in the coming weeks. I really hope things get finished this time...

Still playing phone tag with my contact at Bay West. None of the issues below have been addressed, and it's been over a month of phone calls and polite requests that Bay West act. I keep getting promises, but no action, and I'm getting very frustrated. I guess I'll have to start calling every single day from now on...

Lest anyone thought that we were finished with our house, let me put that concept to rest. Here we are, now more than two years being in our house, and we're still struggling to get a few things finished up. The outstanding issues that are remaining:

• Our microwave is still roughly six inches too high above our stove. This has the next result of it being unusable by anyone under 5 foot 10 inches in height. My concern is that the resale value of our home will be weakened by the mistakes of the cabinet company, and Bay West's inability to catch the error or corret it. We've been assured this error would be corrected all along.

• The underside of our deck is covered in black paint splatters, because the painters were sloppy. Bay West has told us they would have the painters paint the underside completely black, because that was the easiest way of covering up the mistakes.

• We've had paint spatters on our carpet since we had our walls patches, and they've been there for almost a year now. We had a carpet cleaning company try to remove them but they didn't come out. Bay West has been assuring us that they would take care of it.

• Our oak railings have scratches underneath the finish, likely from the carpet installers dragging the carpet over the railings. The tradesman working on the railings didn't fix the marred wood before completing the finish. Bay West has tried to fix this one by sending the same guy back three times, and he never actually fixes the problem, he just tries to hide it.

I've called Bay West twice this week and left voice mail messages, and today when I called for the third time I was assured that they were going to have a meeting and figure out what's next. That's all fine and dandy, but have I mentioned this has been two years?