Your best bet is to first contact a soil engineer to get a better understanding of the property you plan to build on. If blasting or hammering is needed for either structure, it should be performed at the same time. This will prevent possible damage to either structure. A structural engineer is necessary for the pool as well as the house. Someone with experience working in terrain of this nature and also and home and pool construction is recommended. It's not a job for someone to "wing it". There are many considerations to be met working on a hillside-rock or nor rock.

A shower head and a hand held are standard in showers so I don't understand what you would install after. As others have posted, you can find find have a separate shower head or one that is integrated. In terms of cost, Moen along with Delta are two of the least expensive brands of high quality. I wouldn't install anything lower quality in a shower because repairs or changes in showers are expensive down the line since the rough generally has to be the same brand or compatible with the trim. I can't offer an opinion as to whether you are being overcharged for the Moon fixtures. Although Moen and Delta are not considered to be high end, the style and finish determines the price. By high end, I am not insulting the quality but just how they position themselves in the consumer market - Brizo is the higher end Delta sister brand. What does the $3000 cover? When I remodeled the total cost of plumbing fixtures can be shockingly high. My GC or his plumbing tradesperson) supplied the rough and I supplied the trim and told him what the specifications were of the trim so that he could install the correct rough. My experience is that the shower system is integrated and changing it afterwards is a hassle and expensive. Would you be doing this after the tiles are installed?

"Do we have to wait until the land is completely paid off?" Most likely, the answer is no. Talk to potential lenders to find out what options you have, whether they'd spring for a construction loan converted into permanent financing (and rolling the land debt into it) or what.

The other variable would be the quality of the estimate they gave you ... was it just a guess or did they actually do the math using the building plans? My builder's estimate for cabinets was off by more than double. $64K estimate vs $140K actual. I think my builder just included a number for an average kitchen/house and not the actual details of our plans that included stacked cabinets in kitchen, large laundry, large mudroom and many built-ins. Repeat this for many other line items and you can see how we ended up at 40%+ over initial estimate for the whole build. Some of it was certainly covid related, but an equal mount was my builder just underestimating the costs. I had a feeling his original estimates were too low, based on having remodeled a whole house, but we were building in a new state and everyone kept telling us how much cheaper stuff was compared to where we had been living.