Good for you for laying down the law with your contractor. I hope he takes you seriously.

I agree with everyone who said for you not to pay ahead. Make sure if you are doing progress payments that he has really completed as much as you have paid for in case he "disappears".

I, too, had the basement from hell like dmplaura. In fact, her before pictures look just like mine. My contractor took his original 2 week period of time and stretched it out to about 6 weeks or more. I had racoons running around in my basement one night!! He kept pulling off my job to work other jobs and lying about it.

Then, one day we asked him for a quote to use his bobcat to move some dirt and instead of giving us a quote, he just did it while we were gone and didn't even really do what we wanted. At the end of the job, he tried to bill us $300 for that. I said "no way". It wasn't part of the original contract, he never gave us a quote or a change order and we would never have agreed to pay that amount of money for him to do what he did. I paid him the balance due on the contract and not a penny more!

He threatened to put a mechanic's lien on our house. I told him to go ahead and try because he had no documentation that it was ever a part of our contract. I knew my rights because I work in the construction industry and he figured out that I wasn't going to back down. It's a shame because the guy did good work but he was a nightmare to deal with.