That seems like a very good price. I did a quick read through, and a couple of things jumped out. There is vinyl siding, and then there is quality vinyl siding. You should get some assurances it would be the latter. $3500 seems like a good price to upgrade to fiber cement. Just make sure it isn't James Hardie brand prepainted siding. There have been a lot of reports of paint failures with that brand, especially in snow country. A 150 amp electrical service is too small by today's standards. Most homes are built with a 200 amp service. Our new home is getting a 400 amp service. Textured ceilings hide lousy sheet rock work and are almost impossible to repair properly. I suggest you insist of flat finished ceilings throughout the main level, and also the lower level, if you don't take my next suggestion. Either have the builder pour a ten foot foundation wall or go with an eight foot ceiling in the lower level. Either way. make it a dropped ceiling. Dropped ceilings provide direct access to the space above them. It's great for running new wires, access to HVAC ducts, tracing a plumbing leak, etc., without tearing the ceiling out. Good luck. It sounds like a nice home.

Is a root cellar supposed to be wet inside? No damp/waterproofing, spray foam joints/air intake, no drain tile. I suppose direct and honest comments like mine is what kept the OP away for 10 years.

I officially hung up my pipe wrenches and retired on New Years day 2006. At the time my game plan was to go aboard my 36' houseboat for a two to three month cruise then return and build a tiny little one bedroom retirement home that looks like an English gate keepers cottage that I had been designing and dreaming about for the last ten or so years. So much for long term plans...LOL. I have had so much fun on the boat I don't anticipate ever building another house. So far i have cruised the Ohio river from Pittsburg to Cairo, Ill, Un the Mississippi to the Illinois then up to the Chicago sanitary ship canal to Chicago, then back downstream to New Orleans, turning west on the Intercoastal waterway all the way to Brownsville, Texas and back to Ohio, and next summer we plan to circumnavigate the entire east coast of the USA. Mississippi River to chicago,,across the great lakes to New York, Erie canal and Hudson River to NYC then the coastal waters to southern NJ where we will take the Intercoastal waterway around florida to New Orleans and up the Mississippe river and Ohio river back to our starting point. When we feel in a festive mood we can go down river about 40 miles from our home marina and tie up to a casino boat for a day or two. When solitude is in order we anchor in a quiet cove in a wilderness section of the river where i can quietly sip my coffee and watch deer, bear and other wildlife come to the river for water. When we are tied up in a marina and must make those obligotory pilgrimages to walmart we have a motor scooter on the stern deck that we can set off. Laugh if you will but it gets 60mpg at 50mph with two ppl so it is fine for us. The boat is totally self contained with a 20KVA generator, a marine geothermal HVAC system plus we can heat the boat with circulating hot water generated by the engines when we are cruising. (the same method as a car heater). Full size LP gas range and oven in the galley, plus microwave and all the other non-sensical trappings of a full kitchen. Two bedrooms with queen size beds plus the galley can be converted to sleeping berths when we have extra ppl on board. (We can actually sleep 10 ppl comfortably.) The Head (bathroom) is a bit small but it has all the required amenities,tub/shower, toilet, vanity etc. About the only thing we don't have that we might have in a new house is a mortage and utility bills..LOL.

Thanks for your response! I assume that our plans did (though I'm not sure) and our plans were certainly approved so I don't understand whats happening here at all. My contractor is equally perplexed and says he's never heard of this type of installation nor of this being required. The wall in question isn't a shared wall, the other side of it is the exterior of our unit. We also had a permit from the beginning. For some more color on why things have taken so long: a good 7-8 weeks passed with no work being done because our property management company and HOA kept asking for additional documentation in order to approve the addition of a skylight AFTER the HOA president initially told us that she consulted the management and that we were in the clear to include the skylight in our plans (which we did and we began demo. When it was time to make the hole in the ceiling we reached out because we had a question about something and THAT was when they suddenly had a problem with it). The president AND the property manager were flakey, they'd take days to weeks to respond to our calls/emails and after requesting one thing, they'd come back a week later requesting something else, multiple times. It was ridiculous. We've also probably lost a total of 4 weeks due to various materials we needed on back-order. A couple more weeks lost to poor scheduling of workers by our contractor. His father who lives abroad also passed away during this job so he went away for 3 weeks and practically nothing got done while he was gone. The rest was BS from the city like this. I can't even begin to tell you the shenanigans we've had to go through with the city...waiting a week or two for an inspector to come only to have the inspector ding us for something that wasn't mentioned the previous time, etc. Oh and I forgot to mention the work was only for our master bath/closet and the guest bath (we only have 2 bathrooms total) and we've been living in the unit this whole time so work on both concurrently wasn't an option. Some luck we have, eh?