Your bank just wants to see the house finished (regardless of condition) so that they can get the construction loan off the books. They they'll probably sell the mortgage to someone else and you'll be history as far as the bank is concerned. Meanshile, your builder - no matter how bad he is - just might bring them in more business someday. In a similar situation, where I had chosen the banker and then my builder turned out to be terrible (like yours), my banker kept telling me that I couldn't fire my builder because then my house would never get done. And that was even after we got hit with liens from subs and materialmen that my builder had not paid and I was able to show the banker that builder was skimming money off of my build and was supplying the bank with false documents! After I finally decided I'd been screwed with long enough by the builder and fired him, I then had to go thru a long drawn out fight with my banker to get banker to FINALLY agree to allow me and DH to take down the rest of our loan so we could GC to finish our half-completed house ourselves. And, after the house was finally completed and we'd moved in, in the midst of litigation with my builder I learn that builder and banker had apparently become great buddies after we introduced them!!!! Banker had invited builder to play golf with him at banker's country club several times and builder had loaned banker the use of one of his "hunting leases." I do understand that the "boys" only invite other boys to play so I could understand why banker never invited me to play golf. I can live with the "good ole boys network" but DH, who can "good-ole-boy" with the best of em if need be, NEVER got an invite to play golf either! WE WERE THE BANK'S LONG TIME CUSTOMERS with a nice big personal account at bank that was NEVER overdrawn while builder opened a building account there after he started on our house and then bounced checks on it on a regular basis! GRRRR!!! Worst of all was that all the time banker kept telling me that I couldn't fire my builder, I kept believing that banker was a NEUTRAL party and his interests were at least aligned with mine to the extent of wanting to see my house get built and built reasonably decently. HAH! I'd have fired my builder months before I did - and saved myself at least $50K in damages - if banker had just kept his nose out of it! I do feel for you. Based on what you've said so far, it sounds like you're probably headed for litigation. I know you've said you've taken a "ton of pictures" but you need to document the current state of the entire house in a very systematic way. If you don't already own one, go invest a couple of hundred buck in a GOOD digital camera that will also take decent videos. Get several memory cards and one of those things that will let you quickly download your digital pictures instantly to a laptop. If you don't own a laptop, borrow one. Also get a some notepaper and a heavy duty marker pen and some blue painters tape. Go out to the house and post signs showing what room and where (north wall, east wall, etc.) each of the signs is located. Pictures of one wall of an empty house look much like pictures of another wall. The writing should be big enough that it is clearly visible when you videotape and there should be enough signs so that any picture you take has at least one sign in it. Then, in each room, start by taking a video starting in one corner of the and moving systematically and SLOWLY around the room, panning the camera up and down SLOWLY as you go so that every part of every wall, all parts of the floor, the entire ceiling, EVERYTHING winds up in the video. There should be enough signs posted around the room so that at least one of them is in view of the camera at all times. If a wall is not straight or a window is installed crooked or a door doesn't line up right, include a level and plumb bob in the video. When you finish videoing a room, repeat by taking still shots, one after another following the samy systematic plan of going around the room. Take still shots so that each image overlaps the previous one... and again make sure at least one of your signs is visible in every shot. Do the same thing in the basement, the attic, the exterior of the house, and - if you can possibly get a decent light under the house - do that as well. Pay particular care to get extra shots (from all angles) of any work that you have any reason to believe is substandard. But, just because you don't think there is a problem with something, don't skip over it entirely. From looking at my pictures, I discovered that after the plumbing inspection, my builder had cut and never repaired a waste drainage pipe running across my dining room ceiling (he had to put in some extra joists because he'd cut the stringers on some and the second floor was caving in!) Amazingly, until I saw it in the pictures, I never even NOTICED the cut drainage pipe running across the ceiling! Fortunately I reviewed all the pics before I hired a sheetrocker so we were able to fix the pipe before it got hidden behind sheetrock. Imagine the mess that would have been! Anyway, you want to document EVERYTHING about the current state of the house. You also want to hang onto all the previous pictures you've taken - regardless of how out of focus they might be - and try to get them organized by date and by room. The nice thing about digital photos is that you can see instantly if they're in focus or not. When a memory card gets full - or you finish with a room, download the images to the laptop. You can download literally thousands of digital photos to a laptop. Depending on the size of your house, it may take you four or five hours or even longer to do a really good job. Also, because it looks like you may very well wind up in litigation, hang onto every scrap of paper, every email, etc., every note you've taken, etc. that is in any way related to the house or to your relationship with this builder or your relationship with the banker... whether you think it paints you in a bad light or not. You have a legal obligation to do so once litigation appears probable. Other than taking pictures tho, do NOT do anything to the house so long as builder is still on the job. If builder quits, let the house sit until you either hear in writing from him that he has quit OR you and your lawyer notify him that the contract between you has been breached, he has been fired, and he is not to return to the property.

Well, since you're here anyway...:) I would STRONGLY recommend putting in the flooring you want before you move in if at all possible. We've been retrofitting floors over the past few years and it is a huge inconvenience. Floors after all are quite literally the base of everything else in the house. If you can avoid the need to, again literally, pick up and relocate *every* *single* *thing* that rests on the floor of your house, you should! Look around wherever you are living (if it's furnished now) and contemplate not only the amount of sheer work but where the heck you would move every item in the place to redo floors. Huge, huge aggravation. It's one of the biggest regrets I have, that we didn't have the finances to do permanent flooring when we first bought our house. Take it from one who has been there, don't put yourself into that situation unless you have no other possible alternative. If you can afford it, it will be money very well spent to put the tile in now, not later.

Electric radiant is a floor warming system. Hydronic radiant is a home heating system. Not the same thing at all. Any floor electric radiant that doubles someone’s electricity bill is not installed correctly. It adds only a few cents a day to run. Radiant of either kind does suffer from the lag in response time due to thermal mass. It isn’t an instantaneous change the temperature from either electric or hydronic. The larger the amount of thermal mass at a set temperature, the longer it takes to change that temperature. That is why radiant is so comfortable though. It radiates heat, just like the sun does. Open concept homes with hard surface floors will be loud, period. It matters not if the floors are tile or wood. It’s hard floors and a giant echo chamber. Close off a few rooms, or add some baffling from wing walls, ceiling treatments, and cased openings, and the noise is reduced. Add rugs, drapes, and cloth upholstered furniture, and the noise is reduced further still. Carpet the open concept like the old 60’s MCM original open concepts, and it is quieter still. Wood floors on a crawl space are “softer” under foot than tile because of the minute deflection from the framing. It has nothing to do with the wood itself. Glue wood to a concrete slab, and there is no deflection for wood. There is no difference in walking on either tile or wood permanently fastened to concrete.

My jury is out on this one. They used bullnose and not something like Schluter which limits the options on tile sizes and leads to the busyness you see around the sides. The middle tile on the left side looks crooked - is that a niche issue or a setting issue? can't tell The placement is wonky and not centered - but with that tiles size and that niche size, I am not sure what would look better (again - related to the partial tiles around the sides AND the partial tiles along the left side.) What color is your ground going to be? If the answer is dark - you'll hate this every day. If light - you will be okay Who picked the tiles and the niche size? This feels like it would have been a perfect place to use a different background tile to elimiate the weird placement / alignment issue All in all - if this was all they had to work with (the field tile and the half size bullnose) they did a reasonable job - but it still looks unappealing. Don't make it worse with dark grout.