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!