The house nightmare gets darker and more convoluted every day. We learn that more money got sucked away unused, and the cost of finishing the house goes up. There are questions about inspections being skipped - which we so hope are just clerical issues. There are questions about mistakes in the construction loan. Sub-contractors are calling us looking for their money.

NC law says that we're safe from the liens they're filing against us because the sub-contractors never had contracts with us: they had contracts with the builder. We paid the builder, he didn't pay them. Glad I'm not a sub. If there's any money in the construction loan left over after we finish the house, the subs get that. But they can't go after us directly - so far as we've been told.

Lawyer says we can't tell any new builders we might want to use how much is left in the construction loan because it would open us up to accusations of having cheated the subs by cutting them off unpaid, then negotiating to use up all of the remaining construction loan (thus preventing them from getting any remainder). I'm not sure there's much to worry about there. We haven't gone over everything in detail yet, but the chance of finishing the house with the money left in the loan seems slim, to me. That means we'll have to make up the difference out of pocket, if we can. I don't know what happens if we can't. More loans? Crack open our retirement stuff (which would be equivalent to a loan)? Beg from family? We also can't change the house plans or drop any of the features that were in the original contract, for the same reasons : it would look like we are trying to cheat the subs.

Mrs. found a builder who seems willing to take on the job of finishing the house. We went over the house together yesterday. He seems like a nice guy, sits on the board of a tri-county builders association, has a big showroom in town, etc.. So, he's not just a guy in a truck like our last two builders. And he's done this kind of thing before.

Which seems like progress! But, it just brought up a dozen more expensive things that we don't have answers for. Every time we think we're getting close to solutions and answers, more questions and more expensive questions come up.

I think we've officially fired the builder. We had to give him X days notice, to give him one last chance to work on the house. He didn't. That should be a relief since it gets us one step closer to getting the whole thing moving again. But, it doesn't feel like much of a relief. It feels like we're at the bottom of a 10 foot pit of shit and we just found a six-inch lump of petrified shit to stand on.

Every day that goes by, we remember another meeting or exchange with the builder where he did or said something that, in hindsight, was a blaring signal that he was ripping us off. But we checked him out. We looked at houses he had built. He had no negative reviews or problems, that we could find. But people who know him say he started having money problems just before we hooked up with him. And so, instead of getting his shit together, he tried juggling us and the other houses he was building, but he couldn't keep it up. And now we're all fucked. It would cost a small fortune to take him to court, and there's probably no money to get from him anyway.

I've never been this stressed about anything, ever. And it's been going on for three weeks now.

Mrs. is handling essentially all of this. I'm almost catatonic.