Apparently, when my sister parked in the driveway when visiting my mom, she revved her engine too loud and honked at her to intimidate her (according to my sister, she did no such thing and I believe her—we are adults).

For foreclosures, you reverse engineer.

Lawyers, engineer, architect, expeditor, surveyors, etc pile on the fees quickly. 

Our engineering team finishes in roughly 2-3 weeks with no major modifications required to our initial architectural plan.

.- My Resources / Constraints: I'm in a by no means unique, but perhaps less common situation for those getting started; I'm a somewhat senior software engineer at a tech megacorp and should be able to save a couple of down payments per year for lower priced houses (100-200 in my area), or perhaps one medium priced house (300-500).

Quote from @Brent Thomas:@Adam Reilly I would assume you are civil engineer based on this last response.

Youtube is the second largest search engine, and has videos on basically every subject known to man.

I am a FORMER engineer, recently retired.  

Therefore, we can be manipulated or our judgement can be affected by anything that happened during the day.It's called social engineering and it has multiple variants.

Make sure your plans are engineered from someone reputable (don't trust the builder's guy unless you can verify their trustworthiness).