How Signed Change Orders Reshaped an Oshawa Renovation Dispute

The situation

Elena, an IT support lead, and Giulia, a licensed electrician, had lived in their Oshawa home for nine years before deciding to add a second-storey addition and renovate the kitchen underneath it. They hired a renovation contractor, run by a woman named Mai, on a fixed-price contract of roughly $260,000. The work started well. Framing went up on schedule, and the first several draw payments went out without incident.

Partway through the project, the relationship soured. Elena and Giulia began noticing what they considered problems: uneven subflooring in the new addition, water pooling near the new foundation after rain, and electrical work in the kitchen that Giulia, drawing on her own trade, thought looked wrong. When the project reached substantial completion, they withheld the final payment of roughly $110,000, telling Mai they expected a substantial deduction to cover the cost of fixing what they saw as deficient work.

Mai did not accept the deduction. Within weeks, her company registered a construction lien against the property — a legal claim available to contractors and suppliers under Ontario's Construction Act that attaches to the title of the property they worked on, securing their right to be paid. Soon after, she started a lawsuit in the Superior Court for the full outstanding balance. Elena and Giulia came to Treadstone Law needing a defence, and fast — a registered lien on title can complicate refinancing or selling a home, and the clock on responding to a statement of claim does not wait.

What the paper trail showed

The first step in any contractor dispute is not deciding who is right — it is finding out what the documents actually say, because in construction litigation the documents usually decide the outcome long before a trial would. Treadstone's team requested the complete project file from both sides: the original contract, every change order, invoices, email correspondence, and whatever photos existed of the work at each stage.

What came back was not encouraging for Elena and Giulia. Mai's company had kept meticulous records. Every addition to the original scope — and there had been several, including a request partway through to upgrade the kitchen's electrical panel and add pot lighting — was documented in a signed change order, dated and initialled by either Elena or Giulia. The electrical work Giulia found troubling turned out to trace directly back to one of those change orders: a modification the homeowners themselves had requested mid-project, executed to the specification they had approved. A contractor is generally not liable for work that matches what the client asked for in writing, even if the client later regrets the request.

The drainage issue was different. Reviewing site photos and a report from an independent building inspector retained for the file, Treadstone's team found the grading around the new addition's foundation had not been brought back to the slope required to direct water away from the house — a genuine deficiency, unconnected to any change order, and one the original contract's scope of work covered without qualification. The inspector estimated the cost of correcting the grading and re-sealing the affected foundation wall at roughly $22,000.

There was a second complication working against Elena and Giulia. Under the Construction Act, an owner is required to hold back a percentage of the contract price — traditionally ten percent — from payments to a contractor, retaining it for a set period after the work is substantially complete. That holdback exists precisely to give an owner leverage and protection if deficiencies surface late. Reviewing the couple's payment history, Treadstone's team found they had not retained a holdback on the earlier draws; they had paid each invoice close to in full as the work progressed. By the time they tried to hold back the full final payment to cover deficiencies, they were doing after the fact what the Construction Act expects an owner to do throughout the project — and Mai's lawyer noticed the same thing.

What we did

1. Separated the documented claims from the disputed ones. Before drafting any response, our team built a line-by-line comparison of the original contract, every signed change order, and the couple's list of complaints. This sorted the dispute into what it actually was: one real, provable deficiency around drainage, and several complaints that the paper trail did not support.
2. Filed a defence and counterclaim within the required timeline. Once served with the statement of claim, Elena and Giulia had a strict window to respond. We filed a defence disputing the portion of the claim tied to the electrical work, along with a counterclaim for the cost of correcting the drainage deficiency, supported by the independent inspector's report.
3. Addressed the lien directly rather than letting it sit on title. A registered construction lien remains on title until it is discharged, satisfied, or otherwise dealt with through the court process, and it can be a serious obstacle if a homeowner needs to refinance or sell in the meantime. We arranged to vacate the lien by paying an amount into court to stand in its place — a mechanism under the Construction Act that clears the lien from title while the underlying dispute over the money continues to be resolved.
4. Opened settlement discussions once both sides' exposure was clear. With the change-order documentation working against the electrical complaint but the drainage deficiency well supported, we approached Mai's lawyer with a specific, documented proposal rather than a general offer to negotiate — crediting the reasonable cost of the drainage fix against the outstanding balance, and nothing more.
5. Closed out the file with a signed release. Once the parties agreed on a number, we made sure the settlement included a full release of the lien and the lawsuit, and confirmed in writing that Mai's company would not pursue any further claim connected to the project.

The outcome

The case settled before trial. Elena and Giulia paid Mai's company roughly $88,000 — the original $110,000 balance reduced by about $22,000 to reflect the cost of correcting the drainage deficiency, the one complaint the documentation actually supported. The lien was discharged from title as part of the settlement, and the lawsuit was withdrawn on both sides.

It was not the outcome Elena and Giulia had hoped for when they first withheld the final payment. They had gone into the dispute expecting a much larger deduction, covering everything they were unhappy with about the project. Once the paper trail was laid out, most of that expectation did not survive contact with the signed change orders. The electrical work they had wanted to dispute was work they had approved in writing. Only the drainage issue, which existed independently of anything they had asked to change, held up.

Both sides also carried legal costs neither had budgeted for at the outset — legal fees on the defence and counterclaim on one side, and on pursuing the claim and the lien on the other, each running into the tens of thousands of dollars by the time the file closed. Layered onto a dispute originally worth $110,000, those costs meaningfully narrowed what either side actually gained from litigating rather than resolving the disagreement earlier, before lawyers and lien registrations were involved. For Elena and Giulia, the settlement contained the damage: the lien came off title, the dispute ended, and they recovered the one deficiency claim that was genuinely theirs to make. It was a compromise, not a win — and an honest one, built on what the documents could actually prove rather than on how the couple remembered the project.

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