Read the blanks in the contract before you sign it

With a standard form of building contract, most of the risk does not hide in the printed clauses - it hides in the blanks the parties fill in: the payment terms, the completion date, the damages for finishing late, the retention, which is the small slice of each payment held back until faults are put right. Those entries decide when money leaves you, what happens if the build runs long, and what you still hold at the end. Read every blank as a decision rather than a formality, ask why each entry is what it is, and be slowest of all where a blank has been left empty. An hour here buys years of quiet.