Whoa!

Last night, we finally got price from general contractor (deck and gates) after 2 weeks. It was WAY too high. The prices was 2 - 2.5 times higher than we expected. We are now scrambling to try to come up with an alternative plan. I'm a little disappointed about the price, but that's not the main cause of my upset. We've waited so long on this and now we have to get into iterations of contracts. If they continue to take too long, we simply won't be able to have the project done before I start school and we will have to arrange care for the dog (at quite a cost). We'd love to be able to work more with the contractor and try different scenarios but we have to wait so long for each version that we really can't do that. Thus, we are forced to make a decision with scant information.