Yes it is possible, no it is not fair to you. Look up your states lein laws. There are time limits etc. You can not get a CO with a lien on your house. Do you have a CO yet? Try and work something out with the gutter supply people first. Show them proof that you paid the sub. Try and hunt down the sub and force him to pay. I am no lawyer, I am a general contractor who has been through this same situation.

Yes it is possible, and you may certainly have to pay twice. It is terribly wrong, yet it happens all the time.

The bottom line, you need to find out if you were sent intent to lien notices by CO B. You should be notified by certified mail when a company is supplying any of your subs with materials, that they will lien if their supplies bill is not paid. The best way to protect against your sub not paying supplier is to write a check to both parties, the supplier & the sub.

We have battled with two unethical GC's and had many liens filed. We eventually learned and made sure the checks were made directly to suppliers or subs who had done work. This doesn't always make a shady GC or sub happy but you have to protect yourself.

The rules are different in every state. Google construction lien yourstate. Even if you have a CO, there still could be one or more liens.

I would echo everything the others have said. The most important part is finding out if you received the lien notification from the sub within the timeframe specified by your state. Hopefully, you saved it and have it in a file somewhere, but if the sub never sent you a lien notification, they have no right to lien your property and you should not be bullied into double-paying for the work.

Also, in addition, you should find your state's Contractor's Licensing Board website, which in my state (CA) has tons of information about liens, both how to avoid them and how to deal with them once you've got them.

Back in the 80's, when we were building our first home, we had a GC (highly recommended by our architect and others) who we soon realized was having personal financial problems during our job and basically stopped paying his subs, even though we were paying him for the subs' work. Then, he stopped showing up on the job, and the subs starting asking us to be paid for work that we had already paid the GC for...the classic old story! Some of them we paid (basically double-paying) to finish the job, but by the end of the job, several of the subs had liened the property for part of the compensation that they lost due to the GC taking off with our money. The subs had an absolute right to drag us into court, which two of them did, and we had to plead our case and show the judge several cancelled checks that we had made out to the GC that were intended to pay for the various subs who had liened the house. We had some very flimsy invoices and backup, but it was just enough to prove that the cancelled checks we had written to the GC should have covered the subs who were liening us.

The real shame of it was that those subs never got fully paid for their work...for most of them we ended up kind of splitting the difference and paying them partially just so they wouldn't be totally uncompensated.

We clearly learned our painful lesson about liens! Since then, although we've never quite figured out a way to write a check to both the GC and sub without making it a major hassle for them, now we make absolutely certain to match up every single lien notice with lien waivers (both conditional during progress payments and then unconditional at end of job) anytime we give our GC a progress payment. Our current GC knows how paranoid we are about this, having been burned once before, and pays close attention to it for us!

Good luck.

Talk to a real estate attorney.

The supplier can indeed file a lien against your property and in many cases execute that lien by way of a Sheriff Sale to sell your property to satisfy the debt.

COs (Certificates of Occupancy) are issued solely on the home's construction complying with building codes and have nothing to do with financial, tax or any other "liens".

Same thing happend to us, we contracted with a cabinet maker, gave him a40K deposit, we recv'd about 8K in cabinets, then he went out of business. (lawsuit in progress) but the kicker was when we went to close, we had a lien for the cabinets we recv'd. Ended up settleing for a little less, but basically had to pay twice and are still out the 40K