I worked as an Interior Designer in a past life - BC, 'before children' :)... So I know where you are coming from. In your initial post you posed your question in a very general and broad way which: 1. makes it difficult to answer and 2. indicated to some that you might be ill prepared to take on this challenge. Perhaps you were just trying to find out the different ways owner/builders were working on their projects? If you are seriously considering being your own GC then there are resources available to you on the internet and at the library. As dixiedoodle mentioned, The Owner Builder Book is one, it is great. There is a website as well. www.ownerbuilderbook.com I took a class at a community college and the website for the teacher is www.ownerbuilder.com. Tons of good information -that is how I found this site. :) We have decided to hire a builder but I think all of my research will still be an asset in our build. To answer your question about whether you can choose some of your own subs - it will depend on the Builder and your contract. If that is important to you then you should stipulate that and find someone willing to work with you on that basis. An option that might work for you is to find a GC/Builder that will get you through drywall and then you can GC the finish work yourself since you have contacts in the industry. Hope that helps.

there are a lot of internet faxing options many are free some charge a fee if the size is large. FaxZero.com do a google search for "internet faxing" what type of internet connections are you using, what type of modem or router? which version of windows? Are you certain there is not a built in modem in your pc already? most have them and they are generally fax modems. You could run belarc advisor on your pc and get a list of what is on it. go to this link, in the tutorial box scroll to item 100 it gives you the directions to how to use fax in windows wizard. Windows XP - Tips for Email, IM and Faxing! Here is a link that might be useful: belarc

We live in MD, in the DC/Baltimore suburbs although it's pretty rural out here (horse farm across the street, state park south of us). When we built 12 years ago our choices were electric heat pump or oil...there is no gas piped out here. A heat pump heated our townhouse b/f we built and I hated it b/c it took so long to warm up the house and if I wanted a "quick fix" I couldn't stand over the register to warm up quickly! I grew up with natural gas so I am used to HOT air coming out of registers and oil gives me that, as well as the "quick fix" to warm up quickly...and to dry mittens and boots :-) We have a maintenance contract to have them come twice a year...in late summer to service the furnace and late winter to service the A/C. We also have automatic oil delivery and, as far as I know, we still have a "budget plan" with fixed payments throughout the year. Although, since oil has risen so much lately, we actually voluntarily raised our monthly payment so we wouldn't owe a lot at the end of the season. We haven't had an oil delivery lately so I don't know how much it is now...but I'm sure it's quite high...they're forecasting a big jump in home heating oil prices this winter. We're actually considering getting a pellet stove to supplement the heat so we don't use so much oil...but I haven't looked into it too deeply yet to see if it's actually worth it. Besides, the kitchen remodel comes first! When the oil is delivered, the tanker connects to a pipe on the outside of our house that feeds into the 250 gallon tank in our basement. HTH!

Good morning Aceden, Could you post a couple more pictures, please? Pictures looking straight (90 degrees to the face of the glass) at the window centered directly on the crack origin point - right where it comes out of the sash edge. At least one picture about 5 cm away from the glass and one about 50 cm away. There are various reasons why glass breaks, thermal breakage being just one of them. My immediate reaction is that your break isn't thermal stress for a couple of different reasons. You have a very high stress break, so if you can post those additional pictures it might help to determine what happened. Thanks!