I'm no expert but just from my experience the past two years (isn't this whole process exhausting?) it seems some builders are adapting.

Just a quote from my builder who, all in all, is a decent person trying to do a good job:

"Oh lights, yeah you may as well order them yourself. It's probably the easiest thing..."

We deliberately kept the appliances out of the contract. He offered to have his person bid them and I said OK but don't spend a whole lot of time on it etc etc. His prices were way more than we could get.

Plumbing evidently is a bit different. They need to rough it in early and sometimes stuff isn't available then when the client goes to place the order. I found the showroom basically matched online prices for me for the exact same items.

I bought the sink too! That didn't seem to be a problem.

I think it depends on the builder but I think some people in the industry are adjusting to the fact that clients are not so blind anymore. We know what things cost. The showrooms have to compete.

Best of luck!

We are just in the bidding stage and while I have not checked every plumbing and lighting selection, I have found my builder's prices through the local showroom to be better than the online prices. There were a couple of items that were cheaper online but not by much.

The one item with a large ($300) price difference was the Rinnai tankless hot water heater. I have not asked the sales rep about that yet. I have just put it in the budget and her price and will deal with it later when it is time to order.

I don't get how these items were purchased by the vendor for you without your approval? Have you voiced your concerns to your GC, he should be on top of his vendors I would think?

My builder was apprehensive of my buying online at first.

But my experience has been that the fancy showroom places have limited selection, orders take forever, and when things are wrong, customer service is terrible and replacements also take forever. (Not across the board, but a lot of the time.)

Nearly everything I've bought online has come substantially quicker and customer service and returns have been great and quick when I've needed them. This obviously isn't true for all online outlets. You have to check them out to be sure. (I use established sites like Amazon, Overstock, lampsplusopenbox, etc.)

Anyway, my builder has totally come around and now things ordering online is often better. Several times, he's inquired a local place he normally uses to find that something would take 10 weeks and I can get it online (seriously) within 3 days.

The other thing I've found is that when he orders things, he's the one following up (or not) when things are late and he knows exactly what's been ordered (but I might not). When I order things, I have more control and know exactly what's going on.

I always run everything by him so I don't end up ordering, say, plumbing trim that doesn't fit the rough plumbing or whatever.

But it definitely turns out his fears at buying online were unfounded.

We had all these questions when we started, too. Ended up buying lighting locally (ourselves, via lighting consultant. We paid her hourly rate for advice, but got her substantial discount,which was better than online prices.) Made a spreadsheet for plumbing fixtures, GC sent it to the place he uses, so we compared online prices to what they offered him at his discount. Some were higher, some lower, but the total was about the same, so we ordered through his place.

The weirdest thing was the electrical. Once again, we had a detailed spreadsheet, complete with part numbers. The distributer didn't have everything we wanted so they felt free to make substitutions as they saw fit. Black and shiny for black matte, a dimmer that "kinda" works with the LEDs, but not the one recommended by the manufacturer, that kind of nonsense. We're still working on getting that all traded out. Ironically, it was the one aspect that we thought would be the most straightforward...

Our house isn't finished, but we have one pump and one fan and one heater that are not quite working right. Fortunately, those are not things we bought on our own, so the subs are on the hook for replacing them. If we'd bought them, we'd be replacing them, dealing with the supplier, and paying the labor for the replacement.

We bought online for about half the stuff in our new house. Lighting fixtures, furniture for the bathrooms, specialty tiles for the shower. Only had *one* instance of damage - the mirrored medicine cabinet arrived cracked. I took a picture of the crack, with a ruler next to the crack to show the size. I emailed the picture to the vendor, they told me to get the piece repaired at a local glass company and they would pay for the work. Very easy.

The upside of going online is that we got some gorgeous and very unique furnishings for our new house - stuff we would never find locally. We compared prices and pieces from the comfort of our home, probably saved some money. In fact, FedEx just delivered a gorgeous bench for our bathroom - dh found it on Ebay. Very unique and a good price.