My 91 yr. old mother and I hired a contractor to build an addition to our home so that my mother could move home to live with us. My mother paid the amount to the contractor and we didn't use the bank either. We ended up with a crooked contractor that took her money then walked and didn't finish the addition. When we started the process, we didn't do sufficient research so that we were prepared sufficiently to actually go through this process and that was our downfall. There was no schedule for pmts. and he asked for monies almost on a weekly basis yet wasn't completing any of the work. He insisted that we were to pay for the work up front which we should not have done, but again, we are definitely much the wiser now. If you are looking for more information on how things work when hiring a contractor, contact the Consumer Protection Ontario and you will find so much information on what is expected and what is law when it comes to the rules for a contractor to follow. We have learned so much after the fact. There is no need to put any monies into any type of account whatsoever. You should have a schedule of pmts. to be paid only AFTER the work has been completed. I suggest you make your payments by bank draft instead of a personal cheque. There is more support when it comes to whether or not you have made the payment. Just a little more security that way, Also, keep in mind that once you have a proper contract drawn up make sure you have the terms included that cover the possibility that you may want to fire your contractor if he isn't doing the job you wanted or you could run into some legal issues. Also, keep in mind that it is against the law for contractor to walk off the job unless the project is in liveable condition. That means that if the contractor was hired to do a bathroom, he cannot legally walk off the job until that bathroom is in liveable and useable condition. We are now stuck in a legal situation just so we can get enough monies back from the contractor so that we can t least finish this addition. My mom can't even live in it as there is absolutely no bathroom in it. There are so many problems with the addition it boggles the mind and on top of that he destroyed our property. He filled in all our drainage ditches and now when it rains it washes out our laneway. We had a small river running down the middle of our laneway last summer nd it cost us $1000 to have someone come in and temporarily repair it. The gouge down the middle was approx. 4 feet wide and approx. 2 ft to 2 1/2 ft deep. It definitely wasn't a small gouge by any stretch of the imagination. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that you need not put any of your monies into any account and never in one that the contractor has access to. Keep your monies in your pocket so to speak and make sure you have milestones to follow. Make sure you get a proper receipt for every single payment as well.a If you would like to speak with me for more information, please feel free to contact me. If I can help you at least a little, I will feel that I've protected at least one more person from being taken advantage of by a bad contractor. Good luck with your project and please check into the information that is available on the Consumer Protection website. It won't be a waste of your time...

IMHO, the GC's take should not be included in any draw except the final one. He finishes the work, he gets paid. Not before. And, you should be able to hold back some portion of the final amount until he has filed an "all bills paid affidavit" and enough time has passed that any subcontractors who haven't been paid have come out of the woodwork and demanded payment from you. Lien waivers (releases) are helpful but they won't protect you from a thoroughly dishonest GC who is robbing Peter to pay Paul... especially if you are the last Peter in line and he is desperate for cash and willing to do whatever it takes to get you and your bank to release money to him. When your GC gives you lien waivers from subcontractors, take the time to call up the subcontractors involved and make SURE they actually signed the things, that it was for work done on your house, that the work done is properly described in the release, including the dates of the work. Also, make sure that enough time has passed since the release was signed so that, if the GC's check to the subcontractor bounced, the sub is likely to tell you about it when you call. Ditto on invoices marked "paid." I'm speaking from bitter experience with a thoroughly dishonest GC who gave me fraudulent documents which even my bank accepted. These included lien waivers where the GC had filled in the amounts after the subcontractors had signed them (GC inflated the amounts so he could collect additional money from the bank!). It also included copies of old lien waivers from previous jobs which GC had copied and then changed the address and date on! He also gave us otherwise valid lien waivers from subs to whom he had given rubber checks. And, when all else failed, he created and signed waivers himself covering non-existent sub and then "he didn't understand why the phone number on the waiver was wrong." He also gave me paid invoices that, upon investigation, turned out to be for materials that were delivered to and used in another house he was building at the same time. Still others invoices were ones where he had xeroxed the originals then changed the amounts. And, on others, he made copies of valid payment invoices then stamped "paid" on them himself! Don't count on your bank to make sure that your payments don't get ahead of the work either. My bank used a form that set completion percentages for various items, but the form had no line item for things like my elevator (which was 5% of the total cost) and did not take into account my extensive decks and porches (which will run nearly 10%) of the total. Because those items which were at the back end of the build weren't even taken into consideration, even the bank's percentages were "front weighted." After OVERPAYING my GC for the work done, I got hit with lien waivers from subcontractors who basically said - and rightly so - "look, I don't care if you have a lien waiver signed by Mr. A that supposedly covers the painting done on your house, I'm Mr. B and I painted your house and I haven't been paid and I can prove it - so if your GC won't pay me, you owe me." We fired the GC midway thru our build but we are still in the midst of the lawsuit we had to file to try and get him to release the M&M lien he holds. And would you believe, he is trying to extort additional money from us to provide that release??? Apparently his lawyer's theory is that we will run out of money/energy for the fight and will pay our GC off just to get him to go away. What you REALLY need from your GC is a performance bond (i.e., insurance that he will finish the job to the specifications of the contract) but such bonds don't come cheap and the builder will expect to pass the cost of the bond on to you.

*thank you* Tress. Gosh am I fragile -- I'm buffeting back and forth with your-all's flagellation of my stupidity. But you are right, Tress: I did do what I did not in complete isolation from the market or sensibleness or *sense*, not to mention research about these folks. But of course a mistake will be devastating and mistakes do happen. And so I am nervous. To say the least. And likely gullible and insufficiently tough, though not an idiot, I hope (though I recognize this may just be wishful thinking to state as much). These folks are a local bigger-than-one-person cabinet company, run by a local macher who hails from abroad and does business fluently in more than one country. For better or worse. He has kids whom he involves in his company and listens to, hence a latter-day awareness of environmental concerns. He is a businessman, clearly and unabashedly so and upfront. And while I am uncomfortable being hard_as'd about any of this (I am decidedly, and explicitly and consciously *not* a businessman), I have on a few occasions stated a need of mine and found him surprusingly amenable to negotiation. Even in this hard economy, this isn't a sure response. Thus installation and cabinetry is intertwined because at one juncture I received a price which after negotiation included installation. But the price had been derived from cabinetry alone, and with reworking, as subsequently happened, things continued to be priced as cabinetry. Thus essentially in some sense, the installation is free. Not really, of course, as installation is his own separate company, but still part of the same family, etc. You see? Complicated. And a little tricky to parse apart the numbers. But then most importantly is what Tress so acurately and kindly points out: I worked hard to make a decision whom to hire and that decision includes an implicit as well as explicit trust. I agree that the trust should be two-way and I agree that 100% is too much for me to front. But in all honesty, I know more about them than they do about me. I can't say that what I know about them I always know what to do with, but, well, on many fronts the company seemed a safer bet and/or deal for me than another. While I'm *terrified* I've done wrong, it wasn't through absence of diligence. I can't explain why they ask this unusual demand of full payment upfront and I can't explain why they insist this is standard practice in their industry. It is not my sense from my own 'research' that it is and clearly it is not the experience of those on this board. I do not know whether it is untrue that they have "always done this" (well, maybe I do or they wouldn't have wound up with 2 full unpaid-for kitchens in their warehouse ... but what should I do, call the guy a 'liar'?) nor do I know what company this KD was formerly with that they charged similarly. I don't know enough about this whole world of custom cabinetry to know whether there is a little corner of it in which full payment is standard. FWIW this is most definitely a town where there are "an annoying number of millionaires". Only around here, millionaires don't even rank. So this isn't a single-workman's shop, it's a small, locally-run factory. I opted for having some diversity of constructors such that I would not be dependent on the flu-status of a single worker. This seemed safer and potentially faster; we're so tired of being without a kitchen around here! The emotional strain is taking its toll. Moreover the decision would appear to be saving me quite a bit of money. None of this has actually come to pass of course, but a piece of me wonders whether the apparent 'cash-strapped' behaviour of this company couldn't be therefore to my advantage price-wise. That is, I presume some of the reason the guy was willing to come down in his price as much as he was was a certain desperation for my cash. That's the implication of such negotiations. So I did negotiate as best I could; everyone's got their tipping-point. I at this point have invested a lot of time in the company as well as my "design retainer" and want to get through the process. They want the cash; more of it than less. But I didn't want them to walk away so I was unable to negotiate more than 75% down. While my error comes in not having established the peculiar price structure before becoming committed to them, it didn't come from an absence of negotiation or effort in coming to a decision to trust them. My Dad told me that in being a patient the time to be skeptical of a physician was in the time when you're choosing between them, but having once decided to go with one physician's protocol, you will then have chosen whom to trust and your recourse to skepticism should be curtailed. Having chosen whom to trust, then trust them. (True, he died following this advice but I don't think it's causally related - advanced pancreatic ca). So I dunno. But I will officially think no more of it since what's done is done. I do think I'm being treated OK apart from this bizarre matter of the payment schedule. Remind me please why I thought renovating was a good plan?

usually they ask for a percentage up front to pay for any supplies they will buy, then stagger payments based on stages (like after sheet rocking). as a homeowner, I would definitely withhold part of the payment until everything is complete. Not sure what's being done so I can't help with the breakdown of payments.