The Reno Coach

The plaster dust, the ruined finances, the wrecked marriages—why do we do it? Toronto’s masochistic obsession with home improvement 

By Katrina Onstad

 

image credit: Lori Nix

 

In 1999, Bryan Leblanc paid $225,000 for a three-floor, semi-detached house in Little Portugal. The street is lined with simple brick pre-WWI homes so similar that from above, they might resemble a long line of train cars. In this tree-covered pocket of Queen West, junkies, yuppies and semi-famous pop stars brush past the black-clad Portuguese widows heading slowly to mass.

Leblanc loved the house and the neighbourhood. He rented out the main floor and made an apartment to live in on the second and third, knocking down walls and installing a kitchen himself. Though he works in advertising, and has a gregarious, slightly smartass charm to show for it, the place taught him a little about how houses are put together. He used to enjoy construction stuff.

In 2001, Leblanc met an attractive university administrator named Janet Hunter—dry to his goofy, with a bright, gap-toothed smile—and it was great, and she moved in. By the time their mid-30s were in sight, they had started talking about having a kid. The house was close to a school with French immersion, property values were skyrocketing, and a new boutique and a small coffee shop moved in around the corner. Maybe it was time to get rid of the tenants, spread out, take over, commit. The idea turned into an imperative in the summer of 2005 when Janet became pregnant.

They decided on a style of reno that’s typical in this neighbourhood: open up the main floor to turn it into a loft space with a large kitchen, and convert the attic-like third floor into a giant bedroom with a luxury bathroom. Extend the back to gain a second bathroom and turn the little yard into one big deck. In effect, they wanted a three-floor gut job.

Leblanc called a few contractors and ended up with two estimates: the first was from a guy who had left a brochure on their porch. He quoted $135,000 and 16 weeks for the job. But Leblanc was smitten with a company he had found on-line. Nice Web site and a nicer proprietor, a soft-spoken, gentle young guy named Joe Darragh. “I realize now you should never pick your contractor because you want to be friends with him,” says Leblanc.

Over coffee, he asked Darragh if he could match the first quote, and Leblanc is certain he said yes. Darragh, however, doesn’t recall such an agreement. So perhaps the first crack came early, the way divorced couples can look back and isolate an exchange that foreshadowed the future, that said, We see things differently. Before long, their relationship would fracture into anger and debt and lawyers and vitriol between two men who don’t seem prone to vitriol. But maybe as painful was the shift in attitude, the slow poisoning of one couple’s feelings toward that formerly sacred place, the home.

Torontonians spent $7.1 billion on renovations in 2007, up from $3.6 billion a decade earlier. The boom will likely continue despite the threat of an economic recession. Improving what one already has feels like a more prudent expenditure than starting again. When the economy weakened in 2001, reno spending increased. It has grown this year, too, despite the slowing housing market.

Everyone who owns a house in Toronto seems to have a bad renovation story to go with it. These tales are passed back and forth at parties in middle-aged years the way cigarettes were in your 20s. Parroting agent-speak, we say we renovate to “add value.” But necessity is part of it, too: ours is an aging city. Fixing common problems in these old houses—sewage pipes dislodged by tree roots, traces of knob and tube wiring, crumbling lath and plaster—often leads to bigger, more expensive renos. There is a hint of compulsion to it, a constant striving for improvement that defines, at least superficially, our work-obsessed city: If we’re digging up the yard anyway, let’s just convert the basement into a home theatre! It’s the Toronto mantra: More, more, more!

But who will execute the more? We are ignorant about our houses, our cars, the things that mark us as prosperous, precisely because of that prosperity; we don’t have to know how things work, so we don’t. We call in the experts, or the cheapest version of the experts. When we renovate, we invite strangers into our most intimate spaces. The process epitomizes an unspoken strangeness of city living, the distance between blue and white collar, between racial groups and income brackets. All the Torontos that exist but rarely meet can suddenly converge in your house during a renovation.

The potential for disappointment, like the cost, is huge. When coupled with an industry that’s confusing to navigate, the result for the homeowner is mounting anxiety. Sometimes that anxiety is called for: last year, one family’s newly purchased Moore Park home collapsed in on itself during a $400,000 renovation. The contractor—a friend—was uninsured. They lost everTechnically, general contractors and specific trades—like roofers and plumbers—require licences from the city. More than 2,000 have licenses, but many more operate without them. There’s no precise tally of how many unlicensed contractors are currently working out there, but look around: at least one Dumpster is being filled with old plaster and worn floorboards every few blocks. An inspector who investigates licensing violations admits that the city is mostly “reactive, not proactive,” and that when his department hears from disgruntled homeowners—like the woman whose contractor vanished with her money, leaving only a business card and a dead phone number—there’s usually little they can do. Tracking black market contractors is like chasing smoke.  

 

 

The Building Industry and Land Development Association, a GTA lobby group, introduced the Reno mark program in 2001 as part of a PR strategy to combat the impression that all contractors are dodgy ne’er-do-wells. Members are screened, pay a minimum $1,000 annual fee to belong, and abide by a code of conduct that prioritizes safety standards and written contracts. (Apparently etiquette coaching is part of the package, too: Renomark members must agree to return all client calls within two days.) It’s hardly the dominant model in the industry, though: only 176 of the GTA’s contractors are registered.

Several Web sites have picked up (and cashed in) on home owner anxiety. Renocontractors.com is a grassroots version of Reno mark, listing contractors vetted by the site. The Toronto arm of homestars.com—sort of a TripAdvisor for construction—launched two years ago and now gets about 10,000 page views per day. “People need a place to vent, because it’s such a mysterious business,” says HomeStars’ co-founder Nancy Peterson. “You need to get something done so you open your phone book, but you have no idea who’s legitimate and who’s not.”

Incredulous and angry, the HomeStars postings speak of half-finished houses, unmet deadlines, flooded basements and runaway contractors: “They left a big hole in our roof and they’re supposed to be roofers”; “My bedroom ceiling is now lower than the tops of my windows”; “You will be lucky to see him for anything more than one hour every other day.” All-caps—that emotional typographical scream—is popular, as in, “DO NOT HIRE THIS CONTRACTOR.”

At the beginning of December 2005, with the baby on the way, Leblanc and Hunter moved in with a bachelor friend in Liberty Village. They hauled their stuff into storage ($1,100 a month) and slept in the master bedroom of their friend’s two-bedroom condo, paying rent of about $800 a month, while maintaining mortgage payments of $1,200 per month.

Their house, at that point, was in the hands of Darragh, a boyish 38-year-old who runs a contracting company called Blueprint out of his small, shabby-chic self-renoed home in Leslieville (the interior looks a little like a completed version of what Leblanc and Hunter had hoped for). Darragh is an approved member of Reno mark and many of his clients adore him: “He was on time, on budget, completely lovely,” says one Lawrence Park woman who’s used his services three times. “Before him, I had a crew of guys who would knock off at 2 p.m. and get drunk in my garage. That’s not Joe. He’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

According to Darragh, the problems started because Leblanc didn’t have complete architectural drawings, but he appeared so eager to get going that Darragh agreed to begin anyway. Instead of a contract, they had a letter of intent, an unofficial looking piece of paper signed by both men at a Starbucks in High Park. (Many renovators don’t have a contract examined by a lawyer, even when hundreds of thousands of dollars are on the line.) In the letter, the labour costs total $102,820. Everything else—rough and finishing materials, as well as subtrades—would be extra.

“With these old houses, you never know what you’re going to get until you go in,” says Darragh. In Le blanc’s case, the floors were the first complication. The old house had buckled a little. Darragh says the original plan called for a minor fix: levelling on top of the existing floor with plywood and self-levelling cement so they could add new hardwood. Then, once the men had removed the ceilings, Leblanc decided they should also level the floors by reinforcing joists, a more expensive, time-consuming process. “There were a lot of overages—tons and tons of overages—and not only that, but major design changes,” says Darragh. “We ended up doing it verbally, on the fly. I should have     created a paper trail by having him sign off every time he changed orders.”

 

As the weeks passed, Leblanc began to feel nervous. He says he would go by the house after work and find that nothing had changed from the day before, or that certain things were different from what he wanted. Why were the floors unfinished? Where was the pocket door in the nursery? When he got Darragh on the phone, he was often on-site at a bigger project in High Park. Darragh admits the other house had run overtime, but says Le blanc was relaxed in the beginning. “He told me, you know, ‘Do what you have to do,’ ” says Darragh. “I didn’t know he was stressing.”

Their next disagreement was about whether new electrical and plumbing were included in the quote. Darragh insisted the quote applied only to necessary electrical and plumbing changes. Le blanc expected a total overhaul, plus 52 pot lights.

After two months or so, Darragh felt he could no longer work off Le blanc’s verbal instructions and half-finished plans. He brought in an architect to create new drawings. Leblanc asked for more changes: a rebuilt dormer on the third floor; a new staircase; a redesign of the third-floor bathroom.

The 13-week deadline came and went, and the house was still months from completion. The third floor had open holes where windows should be; rooms remained stripped to the studs. When Hunter had her baby on March 10, she brought her home to the rented bedroom in the condo. Suddenly, that one room got a lot smaller. The cat and labradoodle didn’t help. Baby Ruby slept in a bassinet in the bathtub. Hunter remembers it as a dark time. Groggy from lack of sleep, she would fantasize about a nursery.

Meanwhile, the house did not seem to be progressing. A crew of four, plus Darragh, had been promised, but often there were just two on site (Darragh says this is because the plans kept changing, and certain jobs require fewer workers). Leblanc claims that days and weeks went by with no one in the house. Neighbours would report silence. When Hunter came to visit with Ruby in her BabyBjörn, she found two tradesmen who sheepishly said they hoped the baby’s bedroom would be done soon. She later burst into tears and decided she would not visit the house again.

Darragh denies such a dramatic slowdown. He says that all told, he took three weeks off for a vacation and to finish a job in High Park, during which time he didn’t bill Leblanc.

The crack in the relationship had become a fissure. The fissure was soon to be a gaping hole.

What are the power dynamics in a renovation? When home owners talk about how they feel during renovations, they often use the word “vulnerable.” From the word go, the contractor holds the information, and the homeowner holds the money.

A good contractor recognizes the delicacy of the relationship. Kevin (not his real name—he’s unlicensed) is a Toronto contractor who left teaching after one burnt-out year. He had learned construction during summers in university, and when he started doing small projects, he found his calling. Now he’s booked 12 months a year. Part of what makes Kevin attractive to his clients is that he understands the intimacy involved.

 

“It’s a really intense thing. You’re in someone’s private space, in their bathroom, their master bedroom, literally in their closet,” he says. He has fired people who use profanity or don’t recognize those boundaries (one guy he fired, who turned out to have a police record, recently hung out his own shingle and is now renovating houses near you). He counsels his crew not to accept coffee from the homeowner on the first day: “You’re there for ages; sometimes you’ll be there for months. I always say from the beginning, Say no because you don’t want them to feel on day eight that they have to make coffee and bring muffins.”

Kevin says the cause of renovations gone wrong is a communication breakdown, often hastened by a kind of condescension. He notices that people talk differently to architects and designers than they do to contractors. Part of it is the Holmes on Homes phenomenon, which perpetuates the perception that contractors are inherently scammers. But there’s also a class dynamic in play. When things do go wrong and overages come in, a particular anger takes over. “People don’t think it’s right that someone without a degree makes $100,000 a year,” Kevin says. “It’s, ‘I don’t care how skilled he is. I shouldn’t be paying him more than my lawyer.’ But you should, if he’s good. It’s your house.”

Another contractor speaks of unrealistic expectations among homeowners. One client showed him a $50,000 bathroom in Canadian House and Home and asked, “Can you do it for 15?”

Sometimes, in the wake of a failed renovation, people come to feel differently about their homes. At HomeStars, Peterson agrees that shame is the predominant emotion among bilked renovators. “One guy called and said, ‘I’m a Bay Street guy and I got hosed for $80,000.’ He really wanted to talk about it, but he seemed almost too embarrassed to post a comment.” One woman who is suing her contractor plans to sell her house when the case is settled; she feels she can’t live in a place with such a tainted history. Another fleeced renovator likens the sensation to wanting to avoid the neighbourhood where you lived with an ex: I hate this street. This is where I got dumped.

By April, things between Darragh and Leblanc had fallen apart. They were six weeks past the anticipated completion date, and the work was only about 55 per cent finished. Leblanc had already paid $116,907. Darragh says he was owed thousands of dollars in overages, and then two cheques totalling approximately $47,000 bounced. Leblanc claims he warned Darragh not to deposit the cheques until he secured financing.

Without further payment, in May 2005, Darragh walked off the job. Leblanc was furious. He immediately called a handyman friend of his and asked if he could come in and bring the house up to “habitable” status.

When Darragh went back to the house one morning to pick up some tools he had left behind, he found three men hammering away. “I was pretty cheesed off,” he says. “If he’s got the money to pay these guys, why isn’t he paying me what he owes me?”

What he did next, Darragh admits, he did out of anger, at least in part. His wife had just had their first baby, a boy, and the bills were piling up. He worried that the debts from the Leblanc house were killing his business, that he would never recover.

First, he called the city to report Le blanc’s new guys for failing to have the proper licences. And then he went home and typed up a letter. He returned late in the day on May 27 and taped it to the door: “Notice of Injunction: Stop Work Order. Be advised that if work continues on this house, legal action will be taken against Bryan Leblanc and individuals working on premise.”

In the morning, Leblanc’s handyman friend called him: “Uh, Bryan, you should see this.”

Leblanc drove over and stared at the paper, laminated in packing tape. He decided to laugh it off; it hardly seemed like a binding document. And then, the next day, he learned that Darragh had put a lien for $72,980 on the house. “We figured it out because suddenly our credit was frozen,” says Hunter.

They were stunned. Did this mean that after everything, they could lose their house? Leblanc went on-line to read a cumbersome piece of provincial legislation called the Construction Lien Act, which applies to all contracts for improvements in Ontario. A tradesman or contractor who is unpaid, or says he is, has the right to register a construction lien against the title of the property, essentially a charge against the house. A lien can be paid off, or challenged in court within 45 days. But as long as there’s a lien, a house is unsellable. If the homeowner decides not to pay for proper work, the court can order that the house be sold.

“It was the nightmare moment,” says Leblanc. “This guy wants us to pay him but not do the work? I went ballistic.” He called his lawyer, and decided to countersue for $140,000 plus costs, claiming damages for negligence, mental suffering and breach of contract.

Over the next six months, the two met several times for examinations with their lawyers. They sat across boardroom tables from one another, two men who don’t usually wear suits. Stacks of bills, receipts and printouts of job schedules became phone book–size bundles of evidence. Darragh developed crippling insomnia during this period.

When it came time to go to trial, Leblanc’s lawyer projected fees of approximately $50,000. Leblanc and Hunter were financially tapped out. “Our $135,000 reno had already cost us, after the lawyer fees, $200,000,” says Leblanc. The credit line that had originally financed the renovation was still frozen. If they lost, they would have to borrow money from their families. The lawyer warned them that the judge could see it either way.

“We had more to lose than he did,” says Hunter. “If we lost, we would pay and pay, and lose our house. If he lost, he’d just declare bankruptcy and reinvent a few months later.”

They were exhausted and demoralized, but at least they were back in their unfinished house. Faced with the prospect of going over the entire disaster again in court, Hunter and Leblanc looked at each other and decided to end it. Le blanc agreed to drop his case against Darragh and paid him $25,000.

Even though he regards the payment as vindication, it was a bitter sweet ending for Darragh, too. In a quiet voice, he remembers the Leblanc “debacle” as the worst experience of an otherwise untroubled decade-long construction career. He says he lost at least $25,000 on the renovation not recovered by the settlement, plus time and money from the legal case.

“I do think about it,” says Hunter. “I wonder, Was he a jerk, or was he just in over his head? Did he just take on too many projects? Did he go for the money?” Strangely, Darragh says almost the same thing—“I think they just got in over their heads”—though it’s a similarity that only underlines the distance between the two spurned parties.

Walking to their house one day in early summer, almost two and a half years since Leblanc and Hunter started their reno, I spot two other construction Dumpsters on the street, in front of houses much like theirs. Through front windows, the houses show their bones, stripped to frames, awaiting their pot lights.