One of the "joys" of building a new home in an area that's under construction is the nail collection you'll quickly acquire. The problem is, your collection will start in your tires! :-( I've already had one tire patched from a nail, Ashley just got her car back and one tire had a nail, the other had a screw (both were slow leaks). Two of my tires have slow leaks once again, so I've probably picked up two nails. I knew that it was a construction area, but I wasn't prepared for how MANY nails there would be.

We decided to clean up our back yard you see - it was full of construction refuse. We packed up four huge garbage packs, and three arm loads of stuff too big for the garbage bag. Why didn't Bay West clean up after themselves? Who knows. The really shocking part was the nails - I'm not exaggerating when I say that there were easily 10-15 nails every square foot of our backyard. We spent an hour trying to pick them all up before giving up - there were simply too many. I'd say there are easily over 1000 nails around our house, so it's no wonder our tires keep getting punctured - the area probably has 100,000 nails rolling around the dirt and street. I think every new Bay West home should come with a tire patching kit - that would be a useful thing to have. :-)

On the home front, things are getting nearly complete. We're waiting for Canyon Plumbing to come back and look at our hot water tank. Because we have the jacuzzi, we ordered a larger water tank - no sense in running out of hot water. We were told that the standard 40 gallon tank would fill the tub up, but not leave much hot water for anything else. Not liking that idea, I went for the 60 gallon tank - our representative at Canyon Plumbing assured me that I'd have PLENTY of hot water left over. Guess what? I don't. Even after not running any hot water for 8+ hours, if we run the water, we can fill the tub up with hot water but as it gets close to being full, the water suddenly becomes freezing cold. So it's very easy to ruin the bath - you have to sit there watching it and waiting for the cold water so you can turn it off. We paid extra for this? I'm hoping Canyon will be able to offer us some sort of explanation - the first time we asked them, they turned the water heat level up and said "That should help".

Guess what's almost done? The pictures from the walk through - yes, finally!