I'm practically in tears. The "reasonable" quote we got from the contractor we wanted to use was raised to 60k over the original... What the hell?

The most frustrating thing is that I had gotten an e-mail from the first contractor we spoke to, Steve on Monday asking for an update. I had spoken to "Reasonable" Contractor and had gotten assurances that he had confidence in his quote, and we needed to get a more detailed one and then we would sign a contract. So I decided to e-mail the first contractor and tell him we had decided to go with somebody else. No sense in leaving him hanging.

The second I hit "send-receive" I got the revised estimate from the "Reasonable" Contractor. So, now I've pissed off Steve who worked really hard on our bid.

I'm just so inexperienced at this and I HATE not being good at something.

So, I called Rich and he immediately made me feel better. He said the worst case scenario is that we move into the house AS IS. Not a problem, it's a nice house. We get a "pile of cash" from the sale of our condo. We stick it in the bank and we live in the house as is for a year and then we'll get a sublet next spring and do the construction then.

I think we'd have a much better sense of what we needed after living in the house for a year.

So, I'm feeling better.

My husband is so reasonable.

I love him.