Legal Question in Construction Law in California

20 day preliminary lien notice

Hi I am a lic. Contractor. I built a deck for a homeowner. I gave my lumber company the info to set up the job, the first invoice clearly states the owner & address, the subsequent invoices each have the owner�s name. A little over 2 weeks into the job I had trouble collecting payment, to cover my bases I called the lumber company to verify that they had sent notice, they had not. I talked to the accounting dept, at this point we were barely inside 20 days. I asked the gal why notice had not gone out, she informed me that the invoices had accidentally gone to our open account. I let her know that I was dealing with a ''pain'' client and that I needed her to apply all of their invoices to a job account the way it was originally set up, so that they could send the 20 day notice. I called back a couple days later and it still had not been done. At this point the larger invoices had fallen off and there were now only a few small invoices within the 20 day period, we decided it was still a good idea to send the 20 day notice on the smaller invoices. That also never got done, after that, all the invoices were left on my open account. The homeowner then did not pay the bill (T&M) and now the lumber company is threatening to sue me.

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