Of our four candidate contractors, we have decided to proceed with two of them to the bidding stage. The architect has provided each contractor with a detailed set of plans and they will take the next two weeks to review those plans and come up with a fixed cost for construction.

This is probably going to be the most critical juncture in the entire project. The numbers returned by the contractors will tell us definitively (for the first time) if building this house is financially possible for us.