Salon Owners Nearly Missed Their Window to Sue a Contractor

The situation

Franco and Thao had run their hair salon together for close to a decade, splitting the work of cutting hair and keeping the business afloat. In their third year in the current location, they paid a contractor, Minh, roughly $28,000 to rewire part of the space and replace old plumbing behind the wash stations as part of a broader renovation. The job wrapped up, they paid the final invoice, and they went back to work.

For almost two years, nothing seemed wrong. Then the salon started tripping breakers during busy afternoons, and a slow leak behind one of the wash stations was traced back to a fitting that had never been properly sealed. A plumber and an electrician, called in separately, both told them the same thing: the original work behind the walls did not meet a reasonable standard, and fixing it properly, plus repairing the water damage that had built up unnoticed, was going to cost them somewhere in the range of $40,000 to $55,000.

Franco did the math on when the renovation had happened and told Thao he thought they were out of luck. He had read, correctly, that most civil claims in Ontario have to be started within two years. By his count, that window had already closed.

The legal problem

Ontario's basic limitation period, set out in the Limitations Act, 2002, gives a claimant two years to start a court claim. The hard part, and the part almost everyone gets wrong, is knowing when that two-year clock actually starts running. It is not automatically the date of the contract, the date the work was finished, or the date the final invoice was paid.

The Act starts the clock on the day the claim was discovered — meaning the day the claimant knew, or ought reasonably to have known, that they had suffered a loss, that the loss was caused by an act or omission of a specific person, and that a legal proceeding would be an appropriate way to address it. This is often called the discoverability principle. Two renovations that finish on the same day can have completely different limitation deadlines if one owner notices a problem right away and the other does not find out for a year and a half.

Franco had assumed the clock started when the renovation was completed and paid for. But he and Thao had no reason to suspect anything was wrong with the electrical or plumbing work until the breakers started tripping and the leak was found — both of which happened well over a year after the job was finished, and only recently enough that a claim, if it could be framed around that later discovery date, might still be very much alive.

The stakes were not abstract. If the claim really was time-barred, Franco and Thao would have to absorb the full cost of both the original defective work and the repairs themselves, on top of what they had already paid Minh. If the discovery date could fairly be tied to when the problems actually surfaced, they had a real claim worth pursuing.

What we did

1. Rebuilt the timeline in detail, not from memory. We asked Franco and Thao for every record they had — the original contract, the invoices, email and text exchanges with Minh during the renovation, and, critically, records of when the electrical and plumbing problems first appeared. Dates matter enormously in a discoverability analysis, and vague recollection is a weak foundation for one.
2. Pinned down the actual discovery date. The breaker trips had a service call record from an electrician. The leak had a plumber's invoice with a diagnosis. Both records were less than two years old at the point Franco and Thao came to us, even though the renovation itself was well outside that window. That gap was the whole case.
3. Assessed whether the couple ought to have discovered the problem earlier. A claimant cannot simply wait as long as they like and then argue they only just noticed. We looked honestly at whether a reasonable salon owner in Franco and Thao's position should have caught the defect sooner — through routine maintenance, an earlier minor issue, or an obvious sign of trouble. Nothing in the record suggested they should have. The wiring and plumbing were behind finished walls, inspected and signed off on by the contractor at the time, with no visible warning signs until the failures themselves.
4. Documented the loss with independent estimates. We had the electrician and plumber put their findings in writing, along with cost estimates for the necessary repairs, so the claim was grounded in specific, defensible figures rather than a general complaint about poor workmanship.
5. Sent a formal demand to the contractor before issuing a claim. Ontario procedure does not always require this step, but it gives a defendant the chance to respond, sometimes resolve matters without court, and it puts a clear date on the record showing the claim was being pursued diligently once the problem was understood.
6. Prepared and filed the statement of claim well inside the window. Once the discovery date was established and documented, we calculated the deadline from that date rather than the renovation date, and filed the claim in the Superior Court with months of the corrected limitation period still remaining, rather than scrambling at the last moment or missing it altogether.

The outcome

The claim was filed well within the limitation period once it was measured from the correct starting point. Franco and Thao's original assumption — that the two years ran from the date of the renovation — would have led them to give up on a legitimate claim worth tens of thousands of dollars for no reason at all. Instead, the dispute proceeded through the ordinary litigation process, with the limitation defence taken off the table before it could ever be raised.

Because the claim was filed in time, Minh's lawyer never had the opportunity to argue that the case should be thrown out on a technicality without the underlying dispute about the workmanship ever being heard. That mattered more than it might seem: a case dismissed on a limitation period is dismissed on the calendar, not on the facts, and it can happen even when the underlying claim is strong. Franco and Thao's claim for roughly $50,000 in repair and remediation costs was allowed to be assessed on its merits, with settlement discussions between the parties proceeding from there.

The couple later said the moment that changed things was not any complicated legal argument — it was simply being asked, plainly, when they actually found out something was wrong, rather than when the work was done. That question, and the paper trail that answered it, was the difference between a claim that survives and one that never gets heard.

What you can learn from this