tika - I'm so, so sorry. Your neighbours sound horrible, who does that sort of thing?! You have to be seriously twisted up inside. I'm not surprised you had a bit of the cry. Just think that if they are that poisonous outside, they must be eaten up inside. Hugs for you!
rick - How utterly frustrating about the skip 
. Being without heating isn't funny, it's a really cold September. You poor thing! Can you get one of those electric radiators? They belt out quite a bit of heat, and it might just take the edge off for a while. Also, is there any chance of speaking to the builder and getting him to switch to another plasterer who is available at an earlier point? From what I understand, they just ring up a mate and ask them to come and do it - so provided you know the alternative contractor is good, it could work? I'm actually project managing everything beyond the shell myself (because it saves a fortune), so this is what I'll be doing. I may have to ask some of you old hands about the ordering of things!
namedy - I hope the remedial work outside isn't too bad. Everything looks a bit tired in the garden this time of year, but if you had plants in there before, many should survive the winter and pop up next spring, fresh as... well... a daisy. Just getting rid of the main mess and putting down a mulch will work wonders. Inside is a bit trickier, unfortunately.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm resigned to my build running over Christmas. I can see from the timescales we're not realistically going to make it before then. The main delay is the glazing - it's being made bespoke, and the builder has advised waiting to order it until the foundations are concreted so we are absolutely certain of dimensions. It takes 6 weeks to manufacture, so we will have a month or so of twiddling our thumbs before we can knock through. I highly doubt I can concertina the rest of the work sufficiently to get it all done in 3-4 weeks, though we shall see...
One of the things I'm learning about this whole process (and I'm early in it, and no doubt have dozens of unknown problems to face) is that you have to be on top of every detail and approach everything with an attitude of complete mistrust, working on an assumption of total incompetence. When I started, I just saw the plans as this flat, hypothetical thing - I didn't do enough work to really envisage how it would look and feel in real life, which has meant that I've had to play catchup over the last 2 months to really get my head around everything and really understand how it will look and feel. I'm still not there, though making progress.