Gardenlen; Yes it took us a lot of time and money. We spent several thousand dollars fighting this. However, we are planning to sue the township and those involved in the case to recoup our losses. I have also contacted the district attorney's office, and the attorney generals office of pennsylvania to file a civil rights violation case against the township. There is also a new public corruption task force that was implemented and I am trying to contact them as well. The commissioner whom I mentioned in this story has lost his political backing for the new election this year. Hopefully this story has alerted the residents to the type of person he is and he will loose his seat. Galiana; It's funny you mentioned moving. My fiance and myself, have just bought a home in another county. One with a much larger piece of property. In the town we are moving to, chickens and goats are legal. I am very excited about starting a new garden the way I have always wanted to, after learning from all the mistakes i made my first several years of gardening. I already have the plans drawn up for the chicken coop and garden. I will post pictures of the new place at the end of the summer. One thing I do not look forward to is digging up my 20+ apple, apricot, and plum trees. I also have 36 blueberry bushes and 15 honey berry and currant bushes to dig up as well. It will be a busy, busy, fall, but I look forward to the prospects of the new garden.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I am doing a pool with them now in NJ. I am still reserving judgment until I finish the whole process but so far I am frustrated with the rate progress. I had heard and read so many stories about how work is slow and delayed that I really grilled them on this. The sales/design guy said delays between phases of work were a "thing of the past" and that they build so many fewer pools now that it is a "non-issue." I even specifically said since the work will be done in spring when it rains a lot, I know we will have rain days but wanted to know if rain days led to getting re-scheduled to the back of the list and caused a lot of dry day delays. Again, "oh no, definitely not. Nothing like that." Bottom line he said even with typical rain delays I should get from dig to swimming in 8 weeks. Before the dig it could take "up to a month" if the Township holds up the permits� I signed in early March. They dug the hole 31 days later. The Township approved the permit within one working day of receiving it, except for the part A&S forgot to file (new employee I am told � I only found this out because I have a contact in the Township). A&S then took a week to file that part and then just mailed it. Township turned it over almost immediately again. But it took a couple weeks to get the dig scheduled. The hole was dug two weeks ago and counting. That�s where it stands. They did have the steel crew come out about a week later but some of the dirt had slid back into the site so they left and said the diggers had to return. They finally did and it took them and hour in-and-out and they were done very early that morning. Still no sign of the steel crew and from communicating with the scheduler it is definitely the case that I am at the back of a list again, despite being told it didn�t work that way. Of course if they wait long enough it will rain again and more dirt will slide back into the hole and we�ll just have to do this song and dance again. In the best case scenario now it will have been 19 days between the first day of actual work (which took half-a-day) and the next (which will likely take only half a day too). The bottom line is I understand rain delays but I have had more dry day delays than rain so far, and that goes directly against my asked-and-answered questions about how the process would work. BTW, to your other comments, at least where I am they seem to mostly use Jandy equipment. I wish they used Pentair because I wanted to use their control system that had the iPhone/iPad interface. They said they could only install the Jandy PDA system and wouldn�t even quote the Pentair. They use AquaCal for heat pumps, which they strongly pushed as the preferred heating method, and Raypak for propane heaters, Haward for LED lighting and Polaris for sweeps. And they strongly push the Nature2 Fusion system over doing a saltwater chlorinator. They reluctantly quoted a saltwater chlorinator after some prodding but it was ridiculously more expensive that just getting one installed after the fact and they offered zero credit to remove the Fusion system if you did it and were going to force me to sign something that basically indemnified them against any premature damage to the coping or the stone on the raised bond beam. They do use Jason�s as their servicing company. I don�t know if they do the plumbing too since I haven�t gone to that yet. They use Corbin for the electrical.

It does sound like you have had more than your share of problems with your house. It is not always first houses where this happens, either. We were not in our first house very long before exDH was transferred out of state, but our second house had a few problems. I was giving the dog a bath in the front bathroom when I heard water running under the house. Turns out the drain pipe from this tub emptied into the crawlspace through a big hole in the trap! We later learned that the huge floor furnaces were still hooked up to the gas lines - even though the floor furnaces were now under carpet and padding and we had central heat. My next house was a fixer-upper. I knew that going in. I was single by then. I had an inspection done on the house and some of the faults were pointed out to me - the rotten windowsills and bad gutters, the original gravity furnace with asbestos ducts. I had the furnace replaced before moving in. In cleaning the bathroom, I learned that the shower enclosure was not firmly attached to the walls, and behind it it was very moldy. I pulled it down myself and then had to hire someone to sister new boards into rotten wall framing, kill the mold, and put new walls in the tub surround. I used a cheap wall board as a finish product there because I could not afford ceramic tile at the time. This was all before I moved in. Some of the more obvious problems were noted in the city inspection done before the sale, and the sellers were required to have them fixed. The drip-edge molding where the sill met the foundation was gone, and the fascia boards at the foundation were rotten. They were replaced before the sale. My home inspector said the roof was new. He was right. The shingles were all new, but they were laid on top of the bare roof deck on the back side of the house and on top of two older layers of shingles on the front side of the house. The flashing in the back leaked. We did not find out about that for a few years. I knew the gutters were bad, but not until it rained did I learn that the holes in the gutter were mostly above the front porch. The original concrete porch had been removed at some point and a big wooden porch put on. I did not realize that the old concrete porch was not under the wooden one, or that the concrete porch had been the roof of the root cellar. So when it rained, the gutters leaked onto the porch, where the rain flowed down into the root cellar in the basement, across the basement floor, and into the basement drain! I think it was two years before we (I had remarried) had the money for a new porch. Next we got windows and doors, the year after the porch. The back door going from the garage to the back yard had a crack in it big enough to let the snow in. The window sills on one side of the home were rotted (which I knew going in), and when the new windows were installed, we were able to have the contractor fix the rotted wood in the outer walls there, too. I had some boric acid put into the wall before he closed it up, to kill the carpenter ants there. It helped, but we still saw occasional ants for years. Once the old dying apple tree out back was removed, the ants were gone on that side of the house. I had to replace some rotting wood on the garage before they left for good. I went into this house knowing about some of these problems. My home inspector was really pretty useless in finding these other problems. I have never had a home inspector be THAT helpful with a house. We took about five years to get the house structurally sound, watertight, and comfortable. Our house was 50 years old, though, and I know you did not expect your problems with your newer house. The thing I learned hanging out at the Building a Home and Buying and Selling forums is that the building industry hires people who do not know what they are doing. A ten year-old house should not have the problems yours did, but sometimes they do. If the guy who installed your door knew nothing about proper flashing, it would all rot out, just as you saw. Housekeeping is right in the reply above about not having to fix everything right away. I was up nights worried about the proper sequence for fixing things. It is no fun at all to have more projects to do on your house than you can do or can afford. Eventually, though, you get things done and you begin to like the house. Keep focused on what you liked about it in the first place. Even buyers of new houses have some of these problems. There is one poster on Building a Home who had to have her unfinished home demolished because it rotted to the point of being unfix-able before she even moved in. Just looking at things, no one would ever know to expect these problems. And the home inspectors really don't do enough to ferret them out. You CAN't see some of these problems without tearing off molding or getting into walls. Talk to a lawyer if you want to think about suing. Watch DYI network and subscribe to Handyman magazine. You will learn a lot, I did. We ended up loving our house. I hope you get that back with yours, too.

I have finished my inter-library loan anthology that had My Lady Ludlow, the rich lady economizing for her son who doesn't know or care character in the PBS show; and Mr. Harrison's Confessions, the young doctor character with all the female admirers; plus four short stories. At the end, the book shows the loose tying together of these stories from a collection Mrs. Gaskell called Around the Sofa, which had the narrator of MLL, now an invalid holding weekly soirees, telling that story and asking her guests to tell one each. I quite liked Mr. Harrison, although it was one of her early stories, and the learned person who wrote a lengthy introduction called it too sentimental and farcical. Shows how much I know--I found it very funny since the young doctor didn't have a clue. Have you all seen that Cranford has three Emmy nominations--best production, best actress for Judi Dench, and best supporting actress (but I've forgotten for whom).