Oh Man! I live in SE Michigan and while it's too late this year, you have me all fired up about doing a glysophate nuke on my KBG next spring and putting down some bentgrass. Also, I love your part of the country. Have had the privilege to play Blackwolf Run (both courses), but haven't made it back to do Whistling Straits. I do have that on my bucket list though. Not sure you knew about, or even need this yet, but there is a special herbicide (trimec flavor) just for bentgrass. All that time and money you've put into your lawn, no sense burning it up with some generic weed killer. I'll put the link down below for you. Plus I noticed all kinds of bentgrass seed, in various small poundages. I noticed that there are not too many places to buy bentgrass seed in small quantities. Do you think that means bentgrass for residences are not that popular? I would think with all the golfing fools out there that they would entertain the idea of a bentgrass lawn. Interesting. Again, fantastic lawn, look forward to more pictures! Todd

Virgilcarter, you seemed to make many assumptions about our experience, without answering any of my questions. I realize what makes the majority of the cost when building a house and we have already taken all the early steps that you mentioned. I don't know the proper term, but we already have received an estimate breakdown from a home builder and have been talking with them over the past couple of months. We have been looking at properties with them, etc. We realize that we can build the house we want, but with an unfinished basement. That is how I ended up looking at flooring work, tiling, cabinets, etc, and trying to figure out why some of these costs are so much. Every little bit saved gets us closer to a finished basement. I just always assumed that when builders worked with one brand of flooring/cabinets/whatever, they got it at some kind of discount, so it wouldn't end up more expensive than any other place that offers flooring. I'm not saying that they would pass the discount on to us, but I would at least hope it would be at a competitive price compared to other places. No? Thank you everyone for your suggestions and comments. I will definitely follow up with a lot of other builders now! So, two questions... - What about bringing in a sub contractor? I asked the builder and they said it was okay. Is this frowned upon, though? Can this cut down on costs a lot? - What about the companies who really renovate houses and say that they will build, as well. They obviously don't exist as solely a home builder. Is this a bad option?

Our contractors did not really clean up much at all. They gathered their tools and supplies. They promised to return to gather all the lost nails and screws from our yard with the big magnet in order to protect our dogs' feet but that never happened. I had dust EVERYWHERE!!!!!!! I had to go through the whole house and wash all the walls, ceilings, floors and windows. I took down all the curtains and removed all the textiles to be cleaned. We did our kitchen and back landing area and we added a garage to the same end of the house. We also had the guys build us a front porch on the other end of the house. It was pretty much an overall mess. We had compacted lawn and destroyed grass that we are currently repairing with a mix of sod and overseeding. They destroyed an 8 foot section of our fence early on and since it was a sub that did the damage and I didn't get the feeling that his "I'll fix it" would be up to my husband's standards, I told him we'd fix it so we had to do that. We were going to end up doing it over if we let him do it anyway. It took me a couple of weeks to get the house back up to snuff. We have worked on the yard, in various ways, all summer. All this and I would say that was certainly exactly what I had expected. They were cutting a hole in our house and adding a big structure. There's bound to be dust and lawn compaction. Par for the course.

Those things, that you describe as generalizations, are the entire reason for a cost plus build, without them there is absolutely no reason for cost plus contracts. All contracts can be adjusted, but this entire conversation is on generalities. We can't comment at all on the OPs situation directly, without specific knowledge of the contract, the work, the location, the person they are considering and sub quality in the area. The only thing we can do is generalize. The whole legal thing is an interesting tangent, but as I indicated originally of little real bearing. So I am not sure if we should continue down the legal tangent. Edit in response to clarification: First, they are really not mini cost plus contracts, for that to be true then the owner would have to know the builder's profit, because if they spend less the return of savings would be the savings plus the markup (if you spent $2,000 less than the allowance and the builder had a 20% markup, then you would get $2,400 returned). That doesn't usually happen. Second, they are very rarely placeholders until owner decides on hardwood vs carpet. They typically allow the owner to select specific fixtures they want and it goes a long way to proving my point. Tell your builder that you have decided to go with cheap Chinese knockoffs from ebay since he has to warranty them just like they are quality supply house products. You will get a very clear explanation how the warranty is different if you pick crap than for his quality items.