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They dug the hole for our basement and foundation today. We have 9′ walls in the basement so the hole is actually deeper than it seems in the pictures – deep enough to need a ladder in order to climb in and out of it.

Looking south from the street side of the lot

I’m not sure what Ivory is going to do with all the dirt they took out of the hole. Usually, the building will stick the dirt in one of the lots next door; however, because our house is the last house on the street to be built, Ivory supposedly delayed in digging the hole so that they could get a dump truck and put the dirt in it.

Looking south from the backyard side of the lot

Perhaps they already hauled away a bunch of dirt in a dump truck and what is remaining is just what’s needed for backfilling the foundation and grading the lot? Oh well, I wonder how long it will take to start pouring the foundation?

At the end of May, some activity finally occurred on the lot (we signed the papers in January) – the site was surveyed and staked out to show the house position on the lot. We actually don’t mind that the construction process is taking so long because real estate prices in the Salt Lake Valley are going through the roof and we have a price lock on our house. Already, the combination of lot and floorplan for our new house is worth $50K more than we paid for it.

Nancy and I went and reviewed the position of the house on the lot and measured the staked out area to make sure it was done according to the plan (always good to double check things):

Facing North

Facing East

If you want, you can check out the plans online. There is also a virtual tour of a model home with our same floorplan.

As some of you already know, we’re building a new house in South Jordan. Our current house is cramped and lacks enough bathrooms for a family of seven. Of course, when I say cramped I mean cramped by Utah standards in 2006. I often wonder if I’m being too worldly in building this house when compared with the houses my parents built or with the houses of some of my wonderful friends in the Philippines. At any rate, in January we took a big gulp, paid a down payment, and signed the construction papers. Now we get to sit back and watch the house being built.

Well, not exactly. What we really get to do is sit back and fret and fuss and worry whether or not they’re getting it right. As we go through the construction process I’ll try to update this website regularly with photos. For now, here is the empty lot:

Our Lot

Note the neighbors house to the south. The picture doesn’t show the whole lot but the lot is a little bigger than our current lot – just barely at a quarter acre. Due to the size of the house, we’ll have less yard space that our existing house. Nancy and I plan to have less grass. more flowerbeds, hopefully a nice deck, and maybe even a water feature (hey, I can always dream can’t I?)

This week I was out of town at the Laguna Cliffs Resort for a Kofax reseller’s conference (Dataimage is a vendor of Kofax software and services. Incidentally, Dataimage just won Top Reseller in the Rocky Mountain region for 2005) when Nancy called me and told me that she thought Anne had broken her arm riding on the neighbor’s scooter. It’s rather irritating because last year Emily broke her arm riding on the exact same scooter.

I think the problem with the scooter is that Emily and Anne get on it and try to go as fast as their friends do when they don’t have the experience on it. Anyway, Nancy took Anne to the doctor where Anne got a splint on her arm and an appointment to come back in a few days and get a cast. During the next few days Anne complained that her other arm hurt as well so when Nancy took her to get a cast, the doctors also X-rayed the other arm.

Anne at the doctor’s office (that’s Baby Diana in the stroller)

Yup – you guessed it. It turns out that both arms were broken. This makes a total of five broken arms that our three oldest girls have suffered – three of the broken arms coming on scooters. I don’t want to outlaw the (I thought it was way lame when I was a kid and some kid’s parents wouldn’t let them jump on trampolines) but I do wish my girls would use a little common sense and not try to go as fast as their friends when they don’t have enough practice on the scooter yet.

I also wasn’t happy that Anne let other people scribble on her cast but at least she chose a good color.

One of our recent big news items is that we’ve decided to take the financial plunge and buy a bigger house. We seem to be bursting at the seams in our existing home. We originally looked for homes on the east bench of Salt Lake City. My sister Lori lives in that area and we like the neighborhood. Unfortunately, in the past year prices have escalated so much in that area that it became difficult to find the kind of house we wanted in a price range that we could afford.

I’m sure if we had been more persistent in our search we could have found something we liked that we could afford; however, the lure of building a new home where we could pick the floor plans, lot, colors, and options was just to great to pass up. Thus, we started looking for houses in the Daybreak development in South Jordan. Daybreak is a huge development on Kennecott land and the Church has announced that a new temple will be built there.

When looking at Daybreak we generally liked the concepts behind the development and one of the builders had a floor plan that we really liked so we decided to put some money down on a lot. Unfortunately, buying a lot in Daybreak isn’t an easy thing to do. Because the development is so popular, there was a waiting list for lots. It cost $1000 just to get your name on a “lottery list”. Every month the developer would release three or four lots and draw names off the lottery list. If your name was drawn you had 24 hours to decide whether or not to buy the lot or the chance would pass to the next person and you would have to wait another month for the next lottery.

In the first month’s lottery our name was drawn 9th out of 11 which was disappointing. I also grew increasingly more uncomfortable with the way people were throwing money at lots without even getting a chance to see the lot and think about it. In the end I just wasn’t comfortable enough with Daybreak and we decided to withraw from the lottery.

Our next stop was the Ivory Crossing development in South Jordan, just east of Daybreak (on the east side of the Bangerter highway). Our current home is an Ivory Home and although I had some misgivings about buying another Ivory Home, overall Ivory has treated us well and seemed to have the best combination of price and location. Other builders had good location but their prices were more than Ivory’s for the same amount of home. Even more builders had competitive prices but the locations weren’t that great. We wanted a home that we could stay in for the next 20 years until it was time to downsize.

Ivory had a great floorplan that we fell in love with: the Verona. It had everything we wanted except for one thing: the laundry room was on the main floor instead of the upper floor (where are the bedrooms are). We liked the study on the main floor and the layout of the kitchen and we liked the fact that there are no vaulted ceilings (vaulted ceilings are just too noisy when you have a grand piano and five kids). Another great thing we liked about the development was the community pool and neighborhood park. In the end we just felt more comfortable going with Ivory so we gritted our teeth, signed the contracts, and wrote out a huge check for the construction down payment. Hopefully it will prove to be a good decision.

Emily had trouble answering one of her homework questions for math class: “What is more accurate: a measurement given in centimeters or a measurement given in millimeters?”

The author of this question made the classic mistake of confusing precision and accuracy. Precision is about being well defined while accuracy is about correctness. The unit in which a measurement is given has nothing to do with its accuracy (unless the unit is incorrect of course).

Take, for example, the question “What is the value of pi?” An answer of “2.78495718397583711985″ would be very precise but not accurate. An answer of “3.14″ would be accurate but not necessarily precise. The amount of precision needed depends upon who’s asking the question. If your math teacher asks you “What is the value of pi?” then the answer “3.14″ would be accurate and precise enough for the situation. However, if a NASA engineer is calculating orbits for the space shuttle and asks you for the value of pi, “3.14″ is probably not going to cut it. Space shuttle orbits require significantly more precision, say, 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

What? NASA engineers aren’t regularly asking you for the value of pi? Well, it must just be you, buddy, because I’ve got NASA engineers calling me night and day wanting to know the value of pi. It’s a good thing I know all about precision and accuracy.

So, in answer to the question “What is more accurate: a measurement given in centimeters or a measurement given in millimeters?”, I had Emily write the following:

“Neither. A measurement given in millimeters may be more precise but not necessarily more accurate.”

I then wrote a little explanatory paragraph below her answer:

“Emily’s Dad thinks this is a poor question because it confuses the concepts of precision and accuracy”.

Who knows, maybe Emily’s teacher is a former NASA engineer and will appreciate an answer like that? Now, if we can just get Emily through fractions we’ll be making good progress…