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 between them — Franco handled the books and supplier orders, Thao managed the schedule and most of the walk-in clients, and both of them cut hair most days of the week. On top of the salon, the two of them also co-own a small contracting side business that Franco inherited an interest in from an uncle who spent thirty years doing renovation work around Cambridge — a couple of crews who take on small commercial fit-outs and residential renovations on contract, work Franco and Thao oversee on evenings and weekends without cutting into salon hours. It was the kind of combination that does not make anyone rich but pays two families' bills reliably, year after year, as long as nothing goes badly wrong. It was also how they had come to know Minh, a contractor who occasionally subcontracted plumbing and electrical work through the same trade circle. In their third year in the current salon location, they paid Minh directly, roughly $28,000, to rewire part of the space and replace old plumbing behind the wash stations as part of a broader renovation meant to modernize the salon and add two more stations. The job wrapped up, they paid the final invoice, thanked Minh for the work, and went back to cutting hair without giving the walls behind the wash stations another thought.

For almost two years, nothing seemed wrong. Then the salon started tripping breakers during busy afternoons, right when a full row of stations would be running blow dryers at once, 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 on different days, both told them essentially 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 for months, 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, measuring from the date the renovation wrapped up, that window had already closed, and he was ready to simply absorb the repair cost as an expensive lesson rather than spend more money chasing a claim he assumed was already dead.

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 in the first place — effectively paying twice for the same section of wall. If the discovery date could fairly be tied to when the problems actually surfaced, they had a real claim worth pursuing, and the difference between those two outcomes for a small business running on thin margins was not academic.

There was a further wrinkle worth understanding, even though it did not end up deciding the case: discoverability is not a licence to wait indefinitely once something looks wrong. A claimant who suspects a problem and sits on it for years can still lose the benefit of a later discovery date, because the clock starts running once a reasonable person in their position ought to have known enough to investigate. Franco and Thao's file worked because there was genuinely nothing to suspect until the breakers and the leak surfaced — not because discoverability erases the two-year period altogether.

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, describing exactly what was wrong with the original wiring and plumbing and why it fell short of a reasonable standard, along with itemized cost estimates for the necessary repairs. Grounding the claim in specific, defensible figures from independent tradespeople mattered because it meant the case rested on documented professional opinion rather than a general complaint about poor workmanship that a contractor's lawyer could dismiss as one owner's dissatisfaction.
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 and sometimes resolve matters without the expense of court, and it puts a clear, dated record showing the claim was being pursued diligently once the problem was actually understood — a record that reinforces the discoverability argument rather than undermining it with any appearance of delay.
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, since a court asked only to rule on timing never gets to the question of who was actually right. 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 rather than a fight over whether the courthouse doors were even open to them.

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. Franco later admitted that if he had not mentioned the breaker trips and the leak almost in passing during an unrelated conversation, he might have gone on assuming the matter was closed indefinitely, and the salon would have absorbed the full cost of someone else's substandard work.

What you can learn from this