I think deadlines (at least deadlines we BELIEVE in) help us to focus on completing a task. With no deadlines, it is easy to postpone work on that task and spend our time on other things that seem more urgent or more immediately interesting. As a deadline approaches however, most of us experience an adrenalin rush that not only makes us more alert and able to focus on the job at hand but gives us the energy to keep working at it even if we have to forego sleep... just to meet the deadline. The biggest problem in your situation is that the deadlines you're talking about are YOUR deadlines but apparently not your builder's! And, since you're not in control of meeting the deadlines, all they are doing is increasing your level of stress with no payoff. All you get is a sense of disappointment when your builder fails to meet the deadlines. I think you need to find a way of making your builder internalize a deadline to finish your house so that HE feels the adrenalin. I did a search on your name to find your previous posts and get a sense of why it might be taking so long for your home to be finished. The first post I found from you was in September 2010 where you mentioned that the foundation had been poured in December 2009! Wow! I thought, that is TWO FULL YEARS. At that point, I was tempted to chime in to agree wholeheartedly with Worthy and even to suggest that it was long post time for you to get a new builder. But then, looking at some more of your posts, I realized that you are building at a fairly high elevation where winter sets in early and lingers late and you probably have a rather limited number of daylight hours in the winter plus days when roads are closed due to ice and snow. ( You mentioned in your Sept 2010 post that you'd already had a couple of snowfalls in August of that year. BRRRR! But your views are delicious!) Obviously, cold snowy or cold rainy weather is going to slow things down until a house is fully dried in. And, if roads are impassible to large trucks for much of the year, that could slow your build considerably even after you're dried in and most of the remaining work is "inside". I'm a southerner so see very little snow but I can imagine that small vehicles might be able to get up mountain roads that have only had narrow lanes plowed while larger trucks can't get up. So, if the truck delivering your cabinets can't get up the mountain, then your cabinets can't be installed. Since you mentioned "Christmas eve in the new house" tho, I'm assuming you're not building at such a high elevation that they close the roads for months at a time. But, just looking at your portapotty picture tells me that there are no doubt days when roads are totally impassible. When workmen can't make the trip nothing gets done even if all materials are on site. So, it seems like weather in your area may account for SOME of the slow-going that you've experienced so I won't go so far as to say that your builder is totally taking advantage of your relationship and is "blowing you off." And, he does seem to be doing some beautiful work. But, I do think you need to somehow get HIM to internalize some deadlines with regard to finishing your home. Now that it looks like the only things left to be done on your home are all "interior work," work ought to be going forward EVERY single day until the job is completely done unless the road are closed to all traffic so that workmen can't get there. If roads regularly become impassible to large trucks in the winter, that just means that your builder should plan ahead and get all materials on-site when the weather is good and roads are clear even if that means having them delivered to a storage facility at a lower altitude and them putting everything on a truck and moving it all up the mountain the next very time that roads are clear for a large truck. It looks like your garage is "finished" and there is no reason why various materials can't be stored in the garage until he's ready to install them. Not sure what all still needs to be done on the interior of your home but even buckets of paint can be kept on-site as long as you have heat so that it doesn't freeze. Wood flooring should also be stored in the house with the HVAC on so that it can acclimatize before installation. But, pretty much everything else (tile, cabinets, trim, electrical and plumbing fixtures won't be harmed at all by spending time in an unheated garage even in below freezing weather. I will tell you that I fired my GC when our home was at the dried-in stage. I took over as GC and it took me 11 months to finish it so we could move in. The house is 3200 sq ft heated/cooled plus a 900 sq ft semi-attached garage. It is a neo-Victorian with 3 full baths and two half baths, hardwood and tile floors throughout and lots of wood trim. About 3 months of the 11 was spent fighting with my banker to get him to agree to let us take down the rest of our approved loan without having to hire another builder so that we could get started so you can't really count that. So, 7 months to go from dried-in to move-in which is no land speed record but, having never built a home, I had to figure out what needed to be done and in what order various jobs should be done, then find and vet subcontractors to do each task and learn enough about each job to make sure it was done right before I paid for it. Plus, in order to save money, DH and I did many of the smaller tasks ourselves (i.e., painting walls, staining woodwork, hanging interior doors, installing mirrors and towel racks and cabinets knobs, plus all the CLEANING).... all the while continuing to work full-time at our real jobs. Based on the photos you posted in October, I would have estimated that you were less than month out from being finished, so Christmas should certainly have been especially if you had a builder that was really trying to meet that deadlines and making your home a priority. That you're STILL not ready to move in tells me that your builder isn't making finishing your home a top priority. So, while I can understand that you don't want to ruin the good relationship you have with your builder, it might be time for you to throw just a little bit of a hissy-fit. Just enough to let your builder know that underneath that nice, laid-back exterior you've shown thus far, there lurks a monster that he would really rather NOT have to deal with. Then, calm down and talk about setting some REAL DEADLINES. But keep your voice just strained enough that he realizes you've been pushed as far as you will go and that you're holding yourself back from ripping into him. And, once he gives you a new deadline, insist that he break it down into smaller steps for you with individual deadlines to prove that the overall deadline is realistic. And, once you have those, insist that he call or email you every single evening (Mon-Fri) with a quick update on exactly what got done that day so that you can see he is staying on track. You don't have to be harsh and totally unyielding but it is time to be a little bit less laid back! Or, maybe you and your spouse could pull a variation of the good cop/bad cop routine. Stage a "major fight" between the two of you that you allow your builder to overhear wherein spouse screams hysterically at you that she (he?) is sick and tired of this long drawn-out building crap and that if this house is NOT finished so that you can move in by such-and-such a date, she is "out of here" and you're going to have hell-to-pay getting the loan to close (or whatever) so that builder can be paid IF she walks out and files for divorce. If your builder is a half-way decent guy, he is not going to want to be responsible for causing a divorce. And he is not going to like the idea that your spouse filing for a divorce could cause a delay in him getting his final payments once he does finish the house. Maybe the combination will cause him to give finishing your home a higher priority. Good luck and I definitely don't want to see that decorated porta-potty again NEXT year.

hmsweethm - for what it is worth, I'm renovating a 1912 2-story colonial. In my experience, these are the things that have had the biggest impact/bang for my buck. 1) Sealing leaks. I think the house was just one big leak! Caulk, spray foam, weather stripping etc by the carload. 2) High efficiency furnace and A/C. The house didn't have heat upstairs, so we had to use space heaters the first winter! 3) Attic Insulation - someone had put R-15 in about 30 years ago, but it was flattened and pretty useless. 4) Wall insulation - I thought this would help most in winter, but it really moderated temps in summer too. 5) Window coverings - we have old, single pane windows (historic) so they are just never going to be efficient. We put up roll shades with curtains over them. 6) Pipe insulation - super cheap but made an immediate difference. The "hot" water stays hot on the second floor now instead of cooling down along the way.

SolarGary, Thanks so much for your reply. I spent some time browsing the buliditsolar page, and feel I have more questions than answers! I am very interested in making our home as energy efficient as possible, while reducing greenhouse gasses to help alleviate the "myth" of global warming! However, DH and I don't have a huge budget to work with, although we have several k set aside for a new HVAC system. As I said, I was not happy with the position of the HVAC and hot water tank in an enclosed, but uninsulated crawl space, because it struck me immediately as being both inefficient and not ideal for the equipment to be exposed to extremes of temperature and humidity. I grew up in the UK, where hot water "tanks" and boilers are almost always in the house. In fact my mother's 10 yr old house has the gas boiler (like a tankless H20 heater with a pilot) in the garage, under the guest room, while the storage tank is in the "airing cupboard" off the upstairs hallway. Anyway, we were already thinking of updating to a more efficient hot water heater and better HVAC system. I have been reading on the heating and cooling forum about heat exchanger technology to transfer waste heat from the AC refrigerant lines into a hot water tank, which also eases the load on the compressor, thus simulating an increase in SEER performance. Our current AC is a 28 yr old GE model, with unknowm SEER, but probably very low. We are def. looking for a more efficient system, since we are in GA. How about if we did these things: 1) Level and concrete the crawl space 2) Insulate the walls of the crwal space 3) Install a new AC/furnace or heat pump handler in the garage closet adjacent to the crawl space (there's a hole in the wall for ducts already). 4) Drain and reposition the electric water heater and run a heat exchanger device between the AC refrigerant line and the water tank for FREE hot water while the AC is running. 5) Install a gas tankless hot water heater upstairs, adjacent to bathroom (above garage/crawl space cinder block wall) IF we go with a gas furnace also. 6) Install a grey water heat recovery device on the main drain (below bathrooms) in the crawlspace. IF we did this, could we use the electric water heater as a "storage tank" for the water that is heat recovered by the grey system, before it is used by a tankless heater in winter? I'm sorry this is so complicated! Basically, with my climate and energy rates, I am wondering if it might be worth keeping the electric tank to get FREE hot water from our summer AC use (which is pretty much every day from May-Sept in GA), but using a tankless water heater in the winter, since gas is a cheaper and greener fuel to use? I am hoping that adding a grey water heat recovery system could help us offset the loss of all that heat down the drain. Of course, these all just ideas at the moment, and I have ZERO knowledge about how we might actually implement them. I would love others who are more knowledeable on the pratical aspects to give me advice. This is our first home and we are learning a lot as we go along. Although these ideas might be a little "odd" or "out there", I feel that energy efficiency is an investment in our home and future, as it seems that fuel costs will only go up, and maybe the average American is finally coming to terms with this! BTW, I find it odd that most US hot water heaters are on constantly. Is this normal? Growing up, ours were always on a timer switch that you could set for any period during the day or night. I did see a timer for about $40 at Lowes, but it seemed a lot more complicated than what I am used to. Thanks Again!

my son lives in new Jersey and just had a comprehensive energy audit of his house -- a 9 room colonial with 2 car garage built in the 70s. It cost him $125. They did everything -- checked insulation all over the house, did "blower" tests to check for leaks in the weatherstripping, checked the furnace, water heater and central AC to figure out the energy consumption and efficiency of the units. The State of NJ has a program right now that will pay up to 25% of the cost of improvements if they will improve the energy efficiency of the system(s) by a certain minimum amount. So there is an incentive to consider replacing older less efficient furnaces and/or ACs and/or water heaters to take advantage of the benefits the State of NJ is offering. Aside from the state benefits, there are the tax credits offered by the IRS if improvements meet certain standards, and if you Adjust Gross Income does not exceed a certain amount. Competent contractors know all the technical details about the improvements that are eligible for the tax credits. The IRS website has info on income limits to qualify for the tax credits. What should you do? If your furnace or water heater or AC is 10 years old or older, they are nearing the end of their useful life. Therefore, it might pay to look into replacing it or them some time this year and take advantage of the tax credit. the credits expire at the end of the year unless congress extends them.