October House Update

Apparently I have been remiss in my house updates.  I'll admit that I haven't had a huge drive to put up pictures now that the framing is done.  They're about 1/2 way done with the siding now, so I should get those pictures up in another week or two.  Jacob and I have been busy working on the low voltage wiring and just finished that last Saturday.  It took us about 3 weeks.  We are also working on the regular electric wiring, retaining wall, etc.  Actually, I should say Jacob has been doing most of that.  I got a little burned out on low voltage wiring so I've been taking a break.  The low voltage was huge.  I think we put in a total of 36 or so cat 5e ports and 12 coax ports.  We've also put in an intercom system that has 7 stations.  Luckily that was just more cat cable. I've gotten pretty good at wiring that stuff.  If there is one thing I learned from all the wiring, it makes a huge difference in installation to buy the good cable. I tried using some coaxial cable from Lowes and it was awful!  The Belden cable I ordered online was well worth the cost.  I was able to find some good deals on it so it was only about twice as much as the cheap stuff.  Since we did the wiring ourselves we saved on the labor costs on that line item too.

The giant trench for the utlities.  I remember when I was 4 thinking trenches like this went all the way to the center of the earth.

This mess is the framing for the tower.  It really was a mess, but they figured it out well enough.

If you ever have some quality time to spend with me, ask me about the tower truss.

Finished framing, we have a house!

Working on the roof.  We were so utterly grateful for the good weather we had this fall.

The finished roof.  Pretty.  The last of the windows were finally put in today.

This shows the shear amount of cables we put in.  It all comes to a home run in the basement.

I think we put in over 1200 feet of cat 5e and about 600 feet of coaxial cable.  In hindsight I wish we had installed it with pvc so it would be easy to pull and replace later, but that would have been a huge jump in complexity.

We were glad to get the wrap on with all the rain coming now.

You'll see later why Jacob wants the close soffits.  I do like the finished look of it.

The End of an Era

We nearly froze to death, but Phoebe enjoyed her Kindergarten field trip to the pumpkin patch.  Thankfully the rain held off till we were done.  I'm guessing this'll be the last time we go for a long long time.  I told the older kids I wasn't taking them to one.  I think I've had my fill of them.  At least of the associated mud and smells.

Silly Kitty

I've probably used that blog title before, but I have a very dumb kitty.  There were a couple nights when Glen didn't come in.  We finally figured out he had found himself a nice nest in the garage, but he would get trapped in there when we closed the door at night.  Now whenever I can't find him I just look in the garage.  Yes, that's the back of a carseat.

Arrow of Light

Brigham  is about to turn 11, which means the end of cub scouts and the beginning of Boy Scouts.  Yet another program to learn.  At least it should be a breeze with Luke since I've been through it once now.  I wouldn't say that Brigham is an avid scouter, but he enjoys it.

This is Brigham's combined Arrow of Light and crossing over ceremony.  Yes, I know, I have awful posture.  Maybe I'll work on that for one of my personal progress projects.

1st Degree Blue Belt

Brigham continues to move up in the ranks of Taekwondo.  The head of the studio gave him high praise afterwards, which his teacher said is extremely rare.  I think he told him well done, plus he didn't have any corrections for him.

2012 Soccer

Soccer was a huge success again this year.  We're almost done!  Brigham has his last game on Saturday and Luke finished last week.  I've sure enjoyed having such a dry season.  Except last Saturday.  Brigham got soaked.  I had to run  to Costco to get a huge umbrella.  It was worth it.

Brigham had a huge team this year because the league assigned his coach two teams.  It was a little crazy, but they all loved each other.  Brigham's continues to do great and is a solid player.

This is a funny sequence:

Still has shoe.

Where did the shoe go?

Oh well, the game must go on.

Oh, there it is. 

Maybe tie the shoes a little tighter next time.

Luke is definitely not afraid to get in there and go after the ball.

Next year will be great.  It should get a lot more competitive for Luke and they'll finally get to have goalies.

October 2012 Randoms

We had a PPP party for young women's a few weeks ago.  The girls were supposed to wear as many items starting with a p as they could find.  Elle got 3rd place.

Elle is in love with Tiger's curse.  We went to a book signing back in September.  It was a long night, but worth it.  The author's sister is in our ward so Elle gets a lot of mileage out of that.

We're going to be a family of grim reapers for Halloween.

I've gotten lots of compliments on this in the last few weeks.

First place for the ward's dessert contest.  Baklava!

When I download pictures off my phone I'm always finding random self portraits of Phoebe.

This was fake.  She's good.

My headlights were pretty foggy so I did a restoration kit.

Looks pretty good!

First Day of School

I forgot to put up these pictures many moons ago.  The kids have all been blessed with great teachers this year and good friends in their classes.  I really don't have many complaints besides the usual school crap.  I really hope this economy turns around at some point so class sizes can shrink again.  It's getting fairly egregious how large they are.

Luke is as in love with this year's teacher as he was last year.

Elle started middle school this year and it was Brigham's first year at the upper elementary.  They are getting so big.  Middle school hasn't been too bad for Elle so far besides all the teenage hormonal issues (not on her part).  Brigham decided he wanted to play trumpet this year.  Surprised me, but all his friends are in band.  I found a $1000 trumpet for a steal on ebay, woohoo!

Phoebe is adoring kindergarten.

2012 School Pictures

Since all my photography stuff has been in storage this last year (and I decided I don't like outdoor photography) I sunk some money into the school portraits.  It's about the quality I expected, but you couldn't ask for cuter kids (well, maybe we should have trimmed Luke's hair beforehand).

Overexposed

Brigham's picture quality was probably the best.

He's a little crooked.

Looks like she is in mid blink or high on something.

I can't believe I used to think school portraits were high quality.  I'm such a picture snob now.

Gales Creek Closure

For my Gales Creek friends:

In a Nutshell

In the process of having our home built we've encountered more frustrations in one year than I have in my whole life.  (I'm going to have to do a search and replace on this post later with the word frustration). The bank loan was pretty dang frustrating.  It took way longer than we hoped for, but at least we had the comfort of knowing that if things didn't go our way we could always switch banks.  It would have added time to the process, but we would have been assured satisfaction.

The same cannot be said of the parts of the process involving government.  The last couple of days have brought on a few more issues, one in particular for which I needed some type of outlet.  I'm going to start at the beginning. to air out  my frustrations.  One caveat is that this is just the tip of the iceberg.  We are insulated from most of the problems by our builder.  I'm sure if he wrote this post it would be about 100 times as long.

We first submitted for permits back in March.  Our home is completely custom so we expected that it would take a little extra time to get approvals as compared to a spec home.  What we didn't expect is a building inspector that didn't know the 2011 code forward and back.  Our builder, Joe, had to stay up late many nights researching the code to prove to this guy that our house was built to code.  Shouldn't the onus be on the inspector to know this, not our builder?  What are our tax payer dollars going towards?  Permits finally came through mid June, 3 months later.  We had been hoping for at most 1 1/2 months.

When it came time to pay for the permits, I knew that it was going to be around $30,000.  I was shocked when I received the breakdown though.  The vast majority of the fees were actually just taxes.  Taxes for a new home in a place that I've lived for over 10 years.  Here is the breakdown:

Obviously this is subject to interpretation.  My definition of a tax will be someone else's definition of a fee.

$3912.50 went towards actual permits.

$375. 59 towards state taxes.

$24,048 towards city/regional taxes/development.

If the permits weren't frustrating enough, now we get to deal with all the little napoleons in the city departments.

Following are two of the most recent issues.

This Monday, the building inspector was supposed to come out and check the shear panels so we could start roofing and siding.  We're on a ticking time bomb here to get this house protected before the rains start.  I don't want a moldy home!  The building inspector came out and left right away because he couldn't find the plans.  They were right inside the door!  He didn't even bother to call Joe and ask him where they were.

This next issue is the one that gets me the most.  One of the city water guys, a guy named Lonnie, came out to check the water meter and wasn't happy with how Joe had hooked up the temporary water supply.  Now, the first thing to understand is that Joe hooked it up on the residential side, not on the city side.  He just hadn't hooked it far enough away from the meter.  Lonnie not only shut the water off, he also took Joe's hose and water bib (private property) and charged Joe $150.  When Joe called to complain, Lonnie accused him of water meter tampering.  When Joe asked about getting his private property back, Lonnie said, "Well, why don't you just call the police then.", and hung up on Joe.  Really mature.  When Joe called back later, the lady on the phone said, "Oh, you're the water meter tamperer.".  Nice.

The thing that frustrates me about all this is that there isn't much recourse.  Yes, we could probably complain to a superior or even to the city council, but who are we kidding?  Will they actually do anything?  Not only that, but we all know that this will just have further repercussions on Joe in his future jobs around town.  Whistle blowers get all the fame in the private sector, but vilified in the public sector.

Don't get me wrong, I feel so blessed and excited to have this new home.  When I was saying my prayers  Tuesday night, after Jacob told me about this I was just praying for peace and forgiveness for these people.  The Lord did bless me with that peace, but I still have the desire to change the system that leads to this kind of frustration.  Is it any wonder that progress is so stifled in this country.

2012 Summer Tennis

Phoebe found a couple friends to play with and they started massacring berries.

Elle really likes this picture.

Brigham is turning into the bee whisperer.

Sept 4th House Update

Jacob wants to fill the hole around the house with a moat and alligators.

Luke is making us very nervous whenever we visit the house.

We found the resident house poltergeist.

Oh wait, it's just Phoebe.

The dormers really make the back look better.

The attic space.