My wife has already apologized, so I won't belabour the point, but a Blog that doesn't get updated isn't much of a Blog. So here we go! :-)

I'll step back in time later this weekend to talk about the move, and finally show you some REAL photos of the house (it's still top secret!), but in the meantime here are two photos from some rather odd events that have happened in the life of our house thus far.



The image you see above is what paint looks like when water is bubbling up underneath it. How did we manage to get water under the paint in our basement you might ask? Good question. After waiting nearly two months for Prestique to come fix our island counter top, we finally had someone come do it. Of course, this is after he cancelled the week before because he "couldn't find his drill bit", and the day he finally showed up he was nearly three hours late. Normally I wouldn't care, but the night before I just flew back from Germany and was really jet lagged. All I wanted to do was sleep, yet with Prestique coming at 9 AM I couldn't do that...and then he's three hours late. And every time we've had an appointment with Prestique, someone from their office calls five minutes before the scheduled appointment and says "That appointment is cancelled" or "He's going to be a little late." I've never encountered a company with such blatant disregard for their customers before.

When the guy from Prestique did finally show up, he did an excellent job of fixing what his fellow workers screwed up so badly. We now have a beautiful arc, just the way it's supposed to be. I wish someone of his skill worked on it in the first place! In order to put on a new counter top, he had to take the old one off, which involved removing our sink. After he was done, he put it all back on, and everything was great - or so we thought. It wasn't until the next day when my mother-in-law went downstairs to look at the partially finished basement did we figure out something was wrong - and that's what you're seeing in the photo. Somehow the plumbing below the sink started to slowly leak, and water dripped down the plastic tubing and made its way to our new drywall in the basement. It looks like it was a faulty part from Canyon Plumbing, one that failed when Prestique was putting it back together. Bay West has said they'll bring in a drywaller to repair the damage, but the fact that it happened at all is very frustrating. The joys of being a homeowner! :-)

And now on to the light bulbs...



See anything odd about that picture? Two light sockets, one light bulb. If you can believe it, we had FOUR light fixtures in our house like that - for nearly two months we've been living in a house with 50% of the light it was supposed to have. Since we didn't install the light fixtures ourselves, we didn't noticed that there were light bulbs missing. An installer from Signature Lighting came out to look at a problem light fixture, and he pointed out one that he saw. We then went around the whole house, and once you know what to look for, the missing bulbs are easy to spot. The installer said that the electricians sometimes steal the light bulbs, or the builder will take the provided bulbs and spread them out among the houses they're building to save some money. Hard to believe, and I don't know why it really happened, but it's not like we could have four light fixtures, each with a missing light, and have it be totally random.

As you'll see in upcoming pictures, the light in our entry way is high...very high. I didn't really think it through until the installer pointed it out to me, but we'll need a $600, 12 foot ladder just to replace the light bulb in our fan light. A little crazy? Yes. And apparently the light in our stairwell going up is also mounted too high - we'll need ANOTHER special ladder to put a light bulb in there. Poor planning you might say - that's something I'm realizing the more I look at how things are laid out in our house. You'll see this in the pictures, but in the master bathroom, there's ZERO wall space for a garbage can or even a scale. On the blueprint it looks good, but when you see it in real life you think "This just wasn't designed for people". There's a lot we LOVE about the floor plan of this house - it's very open - but there are subtleties that make me wonder if they refined this blueprint at all after first creating it.