I actually have a follow up question regarding the steam shower....our current shower is fully enclosed, meaning it has a tiled ceiling in addition to the walls and floor. Is there a way to use swanstone for the ceiling in addition to the walls?? The "kits" that I see online only cover the walls up to 72"....there doesn't seem to be anything for the ceiling. Thanks!

Thanks for the advice everyone! I really appreciate it.. My husband is not a licensed electrician by any means, but he has 2 good friends who are licensed & insured master electricians. He lost his job after Katrina so he actually worked with them for around 8 months after the storm helping to re-wire flooded homes. My husband ended up running all new wiring (electrical, phone, cable/data) throughout our house and then we got the master electrician over to inspect and hook up everything. We upgraded the main fuses to a new circuit breaker box. Definitely saved us a ton of $$$! I've been pricing materials for about 2 months now and have a pretty good idea of the material costs. I have already determined we are going to be poor for some time! :) Our original plan was to sub out all the seperate jobs, but this contractor is licensed & insured and pretty much knows how to do it all.. he has built numerous homes around the area, including his own, so we have had plenty of opportunities to see his work. I think my biggest problem at this point is that I really want us to do most of the work ourselves. My husband thinks it will cost more $$ in the long run if we attempt to do everything ourselves, which I can't disagree with? But, it's so fun to learn new things!! (My husband says we can go take classes to learn.. LOL) I think we have this backwards.. I thought the husband was suppose to want to do all the work himself and the wife would want to hire someone!! :)

To be fair, I think many people in the industry don't understand the difference between an estimate and a bid, largely because they are not simply headings on a piece of paper. The firmness of an offer will be based on the underlying elements of the offer and not whether you call it a bid or an estimate. An estimate based on a fully specified and detailed electrical plan will carry more weight than a bid based on a floor plan without any lighting detail. So really to know whether you have something that is an actionable firm offer you have to know the specifics of the underlying items. You really just have to use the reasonable person test to determine the difference between the two. Would a reasonable contractor given that information be able to produce a detailed estimate and would a reasonable person given that estimate rely on that estimate as firm? -------------- Just to be clear, my previous post was not an attempt to say that the OP received a bid on electrical, it was only to dispel the myth that a cost plus contract is necessarily a blank check for the contractor, it doesn't have to be. There are many well designed cost plus contracts that could be converted to a fixed cost contract once subcontractor selection has occurred without any additional costs. In the OP's situation, the problem wasn't whether or not this was an offer or a bid. The actionable problem would be the contractor's failure to communicate overages. A contractor in a cost plus contract has a affirmative duty to communicate cost variances to the client. You can't tell people everything is fine and you are on budget and then hit them with a $6,000 overage that you knew about when you told them everything was fine and on budget. I know that it makes for some uncomfortable confrontations, but that is the nature of these arrangements.

No, puttying should suffice. Older style solvent based fillers are akin to oil paint and dry to a reasonably hard consistency. We use a water based filler from Woodwise and it performs similarly. No need to put finish on them. To elaborate on my earlier point, you're fortunate that these are your issues with the floor. If you take a few minutes to search here on wood floor finishing issues you'll find a litany of problems you don't have. Adding another coat to what you have literally invites something much more serious to go wrong. I like to shoot for 100% perfection, but it's unattainable by humans. I'll settle for 95%, but if a floor is 93%, is it worth the risk to make it a tiny bit better? If these are the only flaws you have, your floor is already above 95%. You'd kick yourself if you insisted on another coat and it orange peeled, or had trash in it, or streaks, or holidays, or drips, or puddles etc. And then it had to be coated again and something else went wrong, requiring another coat. Before you know it you're having the floor completely resanded. Consider also that it's quite likely that your floor will exist in it's current level of perfection only until you use it. If you drop something on it next week and make a small ding, are you prepared to pay to have the whole floor redone? How about next month?