One of the nice things about Bay West is that they're not so big as to make us feel like a cog in the machine - so far, we feel like we're important to them, which is a nice change from when I was involved with building my condo. Jeff from Bay West emailed us today with this bit of news:

"I thought I would keep you up to date on the start of excavation. After talking with the developer as to when we can get in and start digging, they informed us that the contractor they hired to construct the retaining wall ran out of stone and had to bring stone in to complete the wall. In the big picture what does this mean? Well about a week to 10 day delay as of Friday last week, so we are not off to a great start, but not to worry once we are, you'll see things take off. If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line."

Not exactly great news, but being told about it right away is nice - building a house is a wild ride where things don't always go as well as you'd expect, so the best you can hope for is to be well-informed.

On Sunday I was talking to a friend of mine at church named Phil - he's a framer (the guys who build the wooden frames for the house after the hole is dug in the ground), and we were talking with him about the shortage of framing crews in the Calgary market right now. He said that there's a massive shortage among most builders, and that we'd be VERY lucky to get into our house by Jan 25th. I'm hoping that the month of "padding" we have on the possession date will allow us to absorb minor snags like this, but we'll see...