It all sounds good then and I'm happy to hear so for you both.
"ups and downs" -> Yes I can get that. lol.
In our case, we only have built twice and often the ups and downs were between me and my wife lol.
Often she would win the day as to what we would have and how this and that would be done, thankfully she does have pretty good tastes.
Our latest house (wife's palace, huge lol), was around 1 yr just selecting all the bits and bobs and house design etc, as it was the dream home.
We went through what you call a building broker who drew up the plans and they then put it out to tender and there was around 15 builders keen to get it.
The brokers initial offer was, that they said they could get it 20% cheaper, which they did.
So we got to assess all the quotes and the quotes themselves, the way they were presented with detail of not (for items we asked for), said quite a lot in itself.
We nailed it down to 5 and then effectively interviewed them and drained their brain.
We ended up going with the one that not long ago built my Son's.
One of the reason was, if there was ever an issue on the son's build, they immediately resolved it with no issues.
Not to mention, their price was also good and they were not a huge builder.
The quote differences ranged between around $400,000
Fortunately, I have a lot of hands on experience of many aspects of the building game and more, so I knew what to look out for and questions to ask.
Some parts of the house, we negotiated that I would be doing certain jobs or parts of it.
The advantage also of that was, I was pretty much always on site, which allowed me to keep an eye on things, LOL, much to the builders pain.
They, I think, were keen to get it to lockup stage to keep my nose out of it lol.
However, obviously the silly supervisor one day must have dropped the keys in the car park, so at the end of each day, we could sneak in and check out the work that had been done.
On handover, there was quite an hilarious moment when I fessed up that we had keys.
The supervisor then said, yes I had expected that somehow you were getting in lol.
It was wrong to keep the key secrete, but because there was so much money involved, I wasn't going to take the chance.
Generally on a project as such, I see the end result from the beginning, and assess any potential issues along the way, and work out how to solve them before they arrive, if they do.
But if there is an error or botch up along the way, it can effect the following things substantially and you have to change some of the following to accommodate the error, hence the earlier you catch it, the better.
The first ever house we built when in our 20's, I subcontracted it and did half myself.
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I was born and bred in this area, we are on 65 acres (close to the wife's second home, main shops lol) and all though we know many people, we pretty much keep to ourselves, happy in our own world and been together for something like 50 yrs.
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