Welcome to building in California. :-) I'm not an attorney, but have negotiated a lot of contracts in my day, and I built a deck (though it was DIY) so hopefully I can shed some light. 0. The drawing should include all the details Jon Mon mentioned. You want a set of drawings that has sufficient detail that if the contractor does something different than you were expecting, you can refer to them to decide whether or not he complied with the contract. You don't want to rely on verbal exchanges you had. 1. 24 months sounds like a solid warranty. 2. What John said. 3. Neglect and negligence are common legal terms. No worries about defining them. But it might be worth a conversation with the contractor about his recommendations on the things you should do to avoid being neglectful (that would be care & feeding). Negligent would be doing stupid things, like running a truck into the railings and breaking them. 4. Consequential loss or damage is indirect loss or damage resulting from damage caused by the contractor. For example, if, when digging footings he cuts an electrical line, he would need to repair the electric line but wouldn't have to replace the food in your freezer that thawed while the power was out. I think this is reasonable. 5. Check state law. 6. The best protection is to "underpay" as you go. In other words, have some money in reserve so he's got an incentive to finish. I'd keep final payment at 25% or more. You could build in a penalty for late completion, but you run the risk of him cutting corners to meet the deadline, so it's a fine line to walk. Plus weather and inspections could delay things beyond his control. 7. This means that if one of you agrees to skip a contractual provision once, the other party can't take that as a blanket permission to skip it in the future. As an example, if I've hired a GC to remodel my kitchen and the contract says he's got to leave the place clean at the end of each day, I might go on vacation for a week and say "you don't need to clean up daily while I'm gone" since I won't be living there. When I get back, he can't take the fact that I waived the cleaning requirement once as a precedent that he doesn't need to clean daily anymore. Or your contract might specify payment every Friday, but one Friday it's raining so he doesn't come to work and says it's ok to pay him Monday. You can't switch all your payments to Monday. This is standard stuff, and fine to have in a contract. 8. Definitely put in the verbiage that his work will meet or exceed IRC, CBC, and any local codes. But don't rely on that to ensure compliance. That just gives you teeth if you have to sue him later. It's much better to ensure that it IS compliant when built, and the best way to do that is to have it engineered and inspected. I don't know if CA requires a structural engineering review on a deck, but if they do, then do it. If they don't, and it's just for your peace of mind, a cheaper way to go would be to get decks.com to engineer you one. It's $99 and they provide footing placement and diameter, joist sizing, and even a materials list. Great deal, IMO, and I was very happy with their service. On permits/inspections, from someone who paid $100 for my permits for a similar size deck, I agree that $2-3K is highway robbery. But that's California. My company supplies modular elevators all over the country and the ones we ship to California cost ~20% more because of the extra engineering requirements they make us do. Some of it is justified because of the seismic risk, but a lot of it is just bureaucracy. That said, inspections make sure your contractor is doing what he should UP FRONT, and I've heard stories of people having difficulty selling their homes because the buyer finds unpermitted work, or local inspectors making people tear down unpermitted work. It sucks, but that's the price of living in California. 9. Again, it depends, but my company is in the process of hiring a SE in CA to do calcs on a 40 foot high welded steel structure and I estimate our total costs (at $110/hr) will be around $2000. So I'd shop it, if you can't use the decks.com option. Or get the decks.com drawings and have the SE just do the calcs, which should save some time and $$. Find someone who does a lot of decks so that they're used to them and are thus more efficient.

It doesn't matter how old the thread is when it is the first thing that pops up on a Google search when looking for the answer to this question.....And then, someone repeats this kind of nonsense on a new thread "A bathroom has a bath tub. It's legalese. It's not a "full bath" without a bath tub." I found this gem first thing, while looking up the reference to this exception where New York doesn't require a bathroom AT ALL. §RR306.1 Toilet facilities. Every dwelling unit shall be provided with a water closet, lavatory, and a bathtub or shower. Exception: Owner-occupied one-family dwellings subject to the approval of the code enforcement official. "NYS has several modification to allow construction of owner-occupied single family homes that have minimal technology, and may heat with wood or other renewable source of energy. This language allows, for instance, construction of Amish residences with little electricity (other than battery operated smoke & CO alarms) and with outhouses rather than bathrooms. Hunter camps may have a similar minimalist construction. NYS has a special condition with respect to the Amish population and to the prevalence of minimalist hunter cabins in the Adirondack Park." http://www.dos.ny.gov/dcea/pdf/AmendmentsDisposition2015.pdf

"I have heard from friends near me that are teachers that the only school personnel in their district that works summer is administration. So I may not be able to get any testing done during the summer." Don't you believe it! They absolutely want you to wait until next year. It's easier and more convenient for them, but will perpetuate the difficulties your SD is facing. Do Not let them get away with this. If they need to use outside evaluators, that's actually even better for you (they're generally more child-centered and less budget-driven), so if they give you the "no one working" excuse, helpfully offer that using outside evaluators would be acceptable to you and would allow them to meet their legal obligations to your SD. Bring them that letter, and from now on, put EVERYTHING in writing. Be polite. Be cordial. But be absolutely be firm and assertive. And be on the record. This is like real estate -- If it isn't in writing, it didn't happen and doesn't count. If you've already verbally agreed to waiting, go back in and reverse your position. Tell them your daughter's education is too important for you to be able to back down on this with a clear conscience, and that you need to insist that the school live up to its legal responsibilities. Helpwiththis - I'm about as non-confrontational a person as you are ever likely to meet, so dealing with school special ed. beaurocracy (sp?) has been very difficult for me. But the stakes for my child are simply too high to allow myself to stay in my comfort zone, and I've had to be firm, and in many cases, unyielding. And the winner has been my child. Practice different ways to say what needs to be done. (Look up what the specific legal deadline for testing is for your state -- I believe the 60 days is Federal, so it would trump anything that's more generous. But if your state has something shorter, then that would apply.) Then find 4 different ways to say "You need to test her within 60 days" and rehearse them until they come out smoothly. This is too important --

To each his/her own, edlincoln. For me, I have two stopping points. The first is my use of several OLD/discontinued peripherals that I use on several PCs. Drivers are no longer updated and sometimes drivers made for earlier versions of Win won't install on later instances. Available for Win10? I don't know or care, happy with things as is. The second stopping point is that I have an all-in-one Sony Vaio that I like a lot with a similar problem, Sony has exited the PC business and no longer makes or sells PCs. So, no updates for drivers. On this PC, I first got the standard "Update to Win 10" MS popup that every PC is showing, and then later a different popup said something like "Don't upgrade to Win10, there's no video driver available for what you have". There's no reason to struggle. I have Win 8 on 3 PCs, and I've added Classic Shell to all. It's fast and stable. I like it a lot. I won't hesitate when the time comes to buy new PCs with Win10 but what I have works fine as is, I see no advantage to upgrading.