>Why not raze the house and start anew? Or better yet, find another location and build from scratch :o)
>

Unless I could have had the new construction done by magic elves I'm afraid it would have been the same. Razing the house would have made living it is a little less comfortable while work was going on ( but not much <s> ) And the land and town were exactly the part we wanted to keep.

Actually pretty pleased with the result. We fired the contractor 2/3 of the way into the job and I supervised the last part myself. I did all the architectural design anyway so I knew exactly what I wanted. Now have an office with a cathedral ceiling, a 10 ft picture window facing my desk where I can watch the deer eat my landscaping and a soaking tub I can lie down in ( while I cry about how much all this cost me.)

One of the best things was putting in tubular skylights. The old kitchen became an interior pantry an with a skylight there is more natural light in there than there was in there when it was a kitchen with a window ( which is now the archway into the new kitchen - cathedral ceiling and skylights. )

Funny thing is, even with a second furnace and air conditioner our utility bills are lower than they were before we added 35% to the size of the house !

And I finally have electrical outlets and lighting everywhere I want it !


>
>>In 2003 I decided I had too much money and I didn't think crack cocaine would get rid of it fast enough so I started a project adding 1200 sq feet ( large office, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen ) and a basement underneath, as well a replacing all doors, windows, siding, blowing insulation into the existing walls, digging out around the entire foundation to iron-core the existing (crumbling) basement walls and moving all electrical phone and cable service from the pole on the street underground to the house. Oh, and we replaced all the sewer lines to the street. ( and a lot of other stuff I have mercifully forgotten )
>>
>>Take what you experienced and multiply proportionately <s> The contractor is buried in three difference places in my back yard.
>>
>>>In this house we had a problem with the edge of the roof. The hose that was supposed to lead the condensed water out of the attic AC unit was not ending where it should, so the water dripped all over the inside of the soffit. The board eventually bent sufficiently to let squirrels in. They made a nest in the attic, bit the hose and generally ruffled the insulation. The damage wasn't extensive (though I had to sit up there in unbearable heat for hours, drilling a hole to lead the new hose into the vertical sewer vent), but the rot did spread and we eventually had to do something about other animals finding shelter in our attic, and possibly rainwater getting deeper in.
>>>
>>>So we opened up yellow pages and found a contractor. He came soon enough, and had a look at what was there to do, sent us an offer and that was it. His guys came yesterday, and did the job fast enough... but:
>>>
>>>- when they were finished, they didn't even knock on the door to say "we're done, come see". They just packed up their gear and vanished.
>>>
>>>- I did not get a report (maybe their boss will come with one, and a bill, later). I wouldn't know that I should replace the lower two rows of shingles if I didn't talk with one of the workers
>>>
>>>- the hole is still there. Its lower part is fixed (as stated in the offer), but the upper part is still open. They didn't even bother to tell me. And it's not that they couldn't see it - it was in front of their noses.
>>>
>>>I've noticed this about the way things are done in the US (and maybe other countries with... well, what could be the cause - legal system based on common law?). First, they reduce the task, then do exactly nothing beyond the checklist. I said "close that hole", and it somehow became "replace the soffit" and all of a sudden there's no mention of any hole. When I had vibrations in my car wheels, I asked the guys in the garage to check for the possible reasons - bent rotor, or brakes or whatever, you tell me. The work order said "replace brakes" and mentioned no vibrations whatsoever. And the vibrations were actually caused by irregularly worn tires, which a friend mechanic told me by just talking. So now I have new tires and new brakes - works fine, but no thanks to the garage guys. They told me nothing, even though "you tell me" was part of the order. This horse-goggle tunnel vision goes so far that I've seen a retailer in T-Mobile say "no we don't have that kind of phone card." -
>with
>>>an explicit period and silence at the end of the sentence. We had to ASK "where can we buy it then?" - and only then he said "oh we have another T-Mobile (read: tee-mowbl) shop 200 yards from here, they have it". Why didn't he volunteer that information? Because we didn't ask, and we, being Europeans, didn't think that we needed to ask. But it came, as an afterthought, as we remembered where we were.
>>>
>>>I don't have the patience for this labyrinthine (or should I say Byzantine) zigzag. Do I have to learn the language of each and every trade when I need anything done? Do I need to learn to say "caveat emptor" at contractor level for every kind of work? If so, then learning the actual work is much more fun, costs far less, and I already got most of the tools. And I get to keep the tools in the end.
>>>
>>>I could have saved the $1500 that this'll cost me - I could have bought a tall ladder and whatever material I needed (wouldn't cost more than $600 altogether), but I wanted to get this done fast and didn't want to bother with where to put the ladder once we're done.
>>>
>>>I'm definitely NOT calling another local or non-local contractor to do what this one skipped. I'm buying a ladder now. Next job, the recovering (ahem, re-covering) of the whole roof, will be done by a completely different contractor, a guy who does Fox for living. And I'm not paying him a dime.
>>>
>>>SET RANT &SetRant