It has been an amazing year for us and we are both looking forward to a great 2008.
In 2007, I left my job at McAfee in Dallas, Texas and relocated back to Salt Lake City with my Wife Ashley. Ash jumped right into school to get her license in Utah and I started working for Zions Bancorp. I was very busy over the summer working a ton of public service events. Ash and I also started hiking in the mountains whenever we could. We got a great trail book and really enjoyed checking them off one by one. We even took Ray on one of the hikes with us. In July we finally sold our Dallas home and traveled back and drove our stuff to Salt Lake in a Budget van. In August I was once again able to speak at Defcon in Las Vegas and this time was also joined by Taylor. In September we enrolled in Financial Peace University and truly changed our lives forever. Ashley got out of school and started working with Sanctuary Say Spa, and finally got her license after fighting with the state for several months in October. Then in December we were able to spend our first Christmas together living in SLC and with Radar. It has been a great year and we love being back in SLC...
HOUSE UPDATE:
If the word "deja vu" doesn't sum up our experience, I am not sure what will. When we first came to SLC we determined that Daybreak was where we wanted to be. We found a plan that we really liked and wrote a contract with Destination Homes. We quickly found out that they were playing games and kept changing the pricing and offers on us, so we canceled that agreement. We then wrote a contract in March with Richmond American Homes to build a house. We followed this one through for several months. All through the build process we continued to get flashbacks of the build project we did with Bowen Homes in Frisco, TX. In November we discovered that the foundation of the Richmond home in Daybreak was poured improperly and tried to work with them to resolve it. On December 31st we finally decided we had enough and canceled the contract with Richmond American Homes and wrote a new contract with another builder on the already done home seen above. This was the exact same as with Bowen Homes, when we left and purchased the David Weekly home that was already done... So with any luck, we will be closing on the new,new,new home by the end of next week (11th) and moving in the weekend of the 12th.
What did we learn from all of this?
1) Bowen Homes is not a good builder
2) Richmond American Homes is not a good builder
3) We are better at buying already done new homes for good deals than building them.
