Building without work plans

The guarantee is definitely required. It could be that you suddenly have to file for insolvency.

Withholding 5% directly is equivalent, isn't it? If not even better? In any case, that's how we did it.

I should have done that too, but I have to say that I initially had trust in this company.

I am not getting any response from the architect's office, I only communicate with the construction company through the lawyer, and I have written twice in vain to the site manager that it is in my interest to maintain a respectful interaction. Now an expert will supervise the construction. Somehow it has to be possible to get the house done the way we want it. I have already taken most of the trades out of the contract anyway.

Let's start from the end: your "offer" consisted of you first wanting €16,515.20 for the contract cancellation, then €10,000, and finally you were willing to cancel the contract for €6,515.20 (today I say I should have agreed to that and paid the lesson fee). Your performance up to that point consisted of commissioning the architect who prepared the building application. Originally, I wanted a planning office from our town to do that, and for that I would have then received a much smaller credit. Your business partner wrote: "it's not much what he does but whatever, our credit is €1,250 net (gross €1,487.50)." It would have been much more than that what he did. Your architect was at our place once for two and a half hours and then never showed up again.

Why are you making an untrue claim here again out of two completely independent issues?
You were dissatisfied with the first architect, whom you are now bringing into the discussion, and therefore we were supposed to plan the project. The "we" includes Massivhaus-Zentrum and the preliminary planning done there. We would have been fine if you had kept your architect. However, you no longer wanted anything to do with him.
By the way, at that time we were still in the offer phase. So you could have made any decision at that point.
The offer for the contract cancellation was fair from the beginning. We would have added money on contract cancellation and would have done so because we knew we wouldn’t get any peace in this construction project. The last offer was from a commercial standpoint an attempt to get you to agree amicably to the contract cancellation.
You also forget that the elevation of the building project already concerned us before the contract was even concluded.
You would not have even paid a lesson fee with the contract cancellation. After all, you received a service that led to a building permit.

You write here something about respectful interaction? That’s interesting! In my eyes, it is anything but respectful when you disparage your contractual partners and publicly present us as an incompetent construction company. You even act as if we demanded decisions from you that put you under pressure. You were able to make every decision. No one set deadlines for you.

Let's leave it, there is no point in arguing with you and it is boring for the others. Build the house and then it is fine, as long as it is done properly.

The guarantee is indeed necessary. It could be that you suddenly have to file for insolvency.

You are forgetting the following: You now have a basement on the property for which you have not paid a single cent so far. If we went bankrupt, that could be completely irrelevant to you because you have a basement as a counterpart in value. The entire payment plan was based on this. You pay according to the construction progress. So you have what you pay for standing on the property. Furthermore, you can withhold 5% from every invoice. This way you always receive more service than you have paid for. Both our construction contract and the payment plan have undergone numerous reviews by lawyers and consumer protection agencies in the past. At no time did we have to correct any passages. On the contrary, the affected homebuilders left the consultations with a good feeling because they were told that these are fair contract conditions.

I do not want to bore the readers with a quote from the Baugesetzbuch § 632a. Everyone can look it up and form their own opinion.