A Contractor's Lien Held Firm Through a Home Sale

The situation

Cristina and Analyn run a small renovation business together in Thunder Bay, taking on kitchen and bathroom remodels around their day jobs. Cristina works as a grocery clerk; Analyn drives long-haul routes for weeks at a stretch. The renovation work happens on evenings, weekends, and whatever days Analyn is home between trips, and it had grown steadily by word of mouth over a few years.

In the spring, they took on a full kitchen renovation for a homeowner named Hassan: new cabinetry, countertops, a plumbing rough-in relocation, and flooring, quoted at roughly $28,000. Hassan paid a deposit of about $8,000 up front, leaving a balance of about $20,000 due on completion. The job ran about ten weeks, mostly in evening sessions, and included a handful of changes Hassan requested along the way — a different cabinet finish, an added run of undercabinet wiring — that Cristina and Analyn tracked in text messages and a running list rather than formal written change orders. The whole job ran under a single contract with a single final balance due at the end, rather than separate staged agreements for different parts of the kitchen, which mattered later for working out exactly when their right to a lien had started running.

When the kitchen was finished, they submitted a final invoice for the roughly $20,000 balance. Hassan disputed several items, questioned whether some of the requested changes had really been agreed to, and paid nothing further. Weeks of back-and-forth messages went nowhere, and eventually Hassan stopped replying to texts and calls altogether. For a business the size of Cristina and Analyn's, a $20,000 shortfall was not a rounding error — it was close to what the renovation had cost them in materials and time, and it was money they had already counted on to cover the next several jobs on their schedule. Analyn's next long-haul run was booked, and the cabinetry supplier for the following job wanted a deposit neither of them could comfortably cover while $20,000 sat unpaid.

The legal problem

Cristina and Analyn came to us with a straightforward but time-sensitive question: how do you get paid when a client simply stops responding? For unpaid work on a property, Ontario's Construction Act gives contractors and subcontractors a powerful tool — a construction lien, a claim registered directly against the title to the property where the work was done. A validly registered lien encumbers the property, meaning the owner generally cannot sell or refinance it without either paying the amount claimed or having the lien removed some other way.

The catch is that a lien has to be registered within a strict deadline measured from the earlier of two possible events — the last supply of services or materials to the project, or the publication of a certificate of substantial performance, which larger or multi-stage projects sometimes trigger before the work is fully wrapped up. A single kitchen renovation like this one, carried out under one ongoing contract with no formal certification process along the way, would not normally have a substantial performance certificate published at all, so it was the last-supply date that governed the deadline here. Once registered, the lien has to be perfected — meaning a court action is started and a certificate of action is registered on title — within a further deadline, or it expires and the security is lost. Miss either window and the contractor is left with an ordinary breach-of-contract claim against the homeowner personally, with none of the leverage a lien provides.

We confirmed the amounts owing against the contract, the change list, and photos of the completed work, and registered a construction lien for roughly $20,000 against Hassan's property well within the required period. That, on its own, secured Cristina and Analyn's position — but it did not get them paid, and Hassan showed no sign of moving.

The real pressure point arrived about four months later, when Hassan's lawyer contacted us. Hassan had accepted an offer to sell the house. The sale could not close with an unresolved lien sitting on title — no buyer's lender would accept that, and no buyer's lawyer would let the deal close over it. Hassan wanted the lien gone quickly and quietly, for as little as possible.

What we did

1. Perfected the lien on schedule. A registered lien that is never perfected simply expires, so as soon as the registration was in place we started the court action and registered the certificate of action within the required window. This is the step contractors most often let slip once they think the hard part is done — registering the claim feels like the finish line, but it is only half of it, and letting the second deadline pass would have handed Hassan the whole dispute for free.
2. Held the line when the discharge offer came in. Hassan's lawyer initially proposed a full discharge of the lien in exchange for a reduced payment, well below the roughly $20,000 balance owed. We advised Cristina and Analyn against simply releasing the lien for less just because the sale was under time pressure — the pending sale was leverage for them, not a reason to fold, and accepting a discount at that moment would have thrown that leverage away for nothing.
3. Proposed vacating the lien by payment into court instead. Under the Construction Act, a court can order a lien vacated from title on the condition that the disputed amount, plus an additional buffer to cover potential costs, is paid into court. This removes the lien from the property and lets a sale close, while the underlying claim continues against the funds now held by the court rather than against the house itself. We proposed this route to Hassan's lawyer as the only version of a quick resolution we would recommend our clients accept.
4. Negotiated the amount and got a consent order. Rather than litigate the vacating motion in a contested motion, both sides agreed on the figure to be paid into court and put it into a consent order, saving weeks of motion scheduling neither side wanted to pay for. The sale closed on schedule, with the agreed sum held safely by the court in place of the lien, and Hassan's buyer's lawyer had the clean title a closing requires.
5. Pursued the underlying claim on its merits. With the sale no longer a pressure point for either side, we pressed the claim in Small Claims Court, backed by the written change list, photographs of completed work at each stage, and the original contract. Hassan's objections to the changes did not hold up once the documentation was laid out item by item, because each disputed extra could be matched to a specific message where he had asked for it.
6. Settled for the funds in court shortly before trial. With the evidence assembled and a trial date approaching, Hassan's lawyer proposed releasing the funds held in court to Cristina and Analyn in full satisfaction of the claim. That offer reflected how thin Hassan's position had become once the change list was laid out item by item, and it let both sides avoid a trial that neither particularly wanted to sit through.

The outcome

Cristina and Analyn recovered the full roughly $20,000 balance from the funds Hassan had paid into court, several months after the sale of the house had already closed. Hassan got what mattered most on the sale side — a clean closing on schedule, with no lien clouding the transfer. Neither side had to wait for the other's problem to be solved before solving their own.

The sequence mattered. Because the lien was registered and perfected correctly and on time, Cristina and Analyn had genuine leverage when the sale came up — leverage that would have evaporated if the lien had lapsed, or if they had accepted a quick discounted discharge under pressure. Contractors who feel rushed into a lower number the moment a sale is announced are usually giving up leverage they did not need to give up. Because the payment-into-court route exists, that leverage did not have to block a sale that had nothing to do with the underlying dispute over cabinet finishes and wiring. The lien moved from the property to a fund; the fight over who was right continued on its own timeline.

It also mattered that Cristina and Analyn had kept some record of the changes Hassan requested, even informally in text messages. That record turned a he-said-she-said dispute over authorized extras into a documented one, which is what ultimately persuaded Hassan's side to settle for the full amount rather than continue disputing specific line items at trial. For Cristina and Analyn, the file closed the way most well-run lien claims do: not with a dramatic courtroom win, but with a sequence of correctly timed steps that never let the pressure land on the wrong side of the table.

The two of them also came away with a clearer sense of what to build into their contracts going forward. On the next few larger jobs, they started asking clients to confirm change requests over email rather than text alone, and set a firmer date for a final walkthrough so there was never any doubt about exactly when a job was finished — the same question that had determined the lien deadline on Hassan's kitchen in the first place.

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