‘We’ve lost a lot’: Whitby family’s year-long home renovation nightmare shatters trust in contractors

Eighteen months since renovations began on their Whitby home on Renfield Crescent, their life was “a nightmare.”

“She (Rachel) is very traumatized and it’s a nightmare because there is just not enough room and we can’t even clean her bedroom properly. She can’t do her crafts, she doesn’t have a table. Both girls say we’ve forgotten how to eat at a table anymore and they don’t remember what our home looked like,” Lobo said.

‘We’ve lost a lot of things’

“We’ve lost a lot of things, emotionally, financially,” said Bhat, who worries his relationship with Lobo and his daughters has been damaged by the stress and fear of skyrocketing costs and unfinished work on the renovation.

Lobo and Bhat had expected contractor Trevor Dennis to complete a $255,000 renovation within months, but by December 2024, the couple was left with less than half the work completed after the contractor had been paid fees of $175,000 since July 2023.

Asked multiple times why more work wasn’t completed, Dennis appeared to blame a decrease in business and rising expenses.

“There’s some (subcontractors who have been paid) more than others. There’s some that are at different stages than others. And then things slowed down drastically … And my expenses went through the roof. Did I try and keep the project going? A thousand per cent I did, to the point where literally days after you and I spoke (in a December interview), I sent them letters from trades stating they will not be financially responsible to let us come in and finish,” Dennis said of the Lobo-Bhat project.

“Business is in a rough spot. This contract put me in a rough spot. That’s exactly where it’s at. I have nothing else to say towards the bankruptcy,” he said.

Dennis, interviewed three times for this story, said in a Feb. 19 interview he regretted the problems caused to Lobo and Bhat: “A hundred per cent I do, and it also cost me a tremendous amount of money as well.”

He insisted the entire renovation, which began in August 2023 with the gutting of the couple’s first floor, could have been salvaged in mid-December 2024.

He said Bhat and Lobo just had to allow two subcontractors to come in to finish the work at no cost to them.

“I’m telling you they were given guarantees that they would not be financially responsible to bring the project to where it needed to be,” Dennis said.

But the couple had lost faith and trust in Dennis long before that point and demanded guarantees from the contractor before they would allow any further work to be done. They said he wouldn’t or couldn’t provide them.

During his time working on the Lobo-Bhat renovation, Dennis had two families win default judgments totalling nearly $93,000 against him.

On Dec. 30, Dennis went bankrupt, claiming debts of $697,513.

Lobo and Bhat have had to seek out help from another contractor to complete the job Dennis started. That work will cost them another $175,000 and they say they could end up paying more, depending on the outcome of an ongoing legal issue and possible future legal liability.

Here’s how it all started

Lobo and Bhat moved to their home in 2017 when their daughters were preschoolers. Lobo had started a thriving catering and cooking business, specializing in Indian cuisine, and was eager to expand her growing home business, but their current house was not sufficient to meet health department standards needed to expand.

Bhat and Lobo began to search the surrounding area in 2021 for homes that would be a good fit, but failed to find anything close to their price range.

By 2022, they realized a home renovation might be the answer and were connected by a friend with local Whitby architect Dave Rolfe, who would do the project’s drawings for the renovation.

The couple did their due diligence, researching and inviting several contractors to bid on their project — a downstairs redesign and a backyard addition to serve as a kitchen for Lobo’s catering business and cooking class venture.

They also planned to add a basement apartment.

Of the “six or seven” bids received, many were much higher than Dennis’s eventual winning bid.

Rolfe knows Dennis, though “not that well,” he said, and recommended him based on past work and because he was a local businessman. Dennis gave references that came back satisfactory, Lobo said, with clients saying they were pleased with the contractor’s work. Lobo and Bhat even went to a home Dennis worked on several years earlier and were impressed enough with the quality to accept his bid.

They signed a contract on July 25, 2023 to pay $255,000 plus HST to complete the job by Dec. 13, 2023, based on the initial timeline provided to the couple by Dennis.

Bhat financed the renovation project on a bank line of credit.

Problems began while the family was away on vacation. When they arrived home at the end of August, they found out the project’s permit would not be approved, a miscalculation on Rolfe’s part.

He owns up to the mistake.

“When we submitted the initial permit application, there were some complications. That was my fault,” Rolfe said in an interview Feb. 19.

“I’ve owned that. That was my fault,” Rolfe said.

‘I’ve owned that. That was my fault’

The permit delay held up the project by about six weeks. The couple finally got a permit Oct. 6 that allowed Dennis to begin work that day on the ground floor section of the house.

It meant the initial Dec. 13 deadline was pushed back for the project’s completion and the backyard addition would have to wait until at least late spring 2024 for completion.

In what came to be a repeating pattern, Dennis wasn’t able to meet with the couple to discuss the project, work didn’t start when he told them it would, subcontractors began to place liens on their property — including for $23,000 by the company that did the demolition in August while they were away — and requests for accounting of where their money was going weren’t provided by Dennis.

Dennis’s inability to make progress on the downstairs floor from October 2023 to January 2024 is revealed in a massive file of text messages between Dennis and Lobo and Bhat that began in July 2023 and extended to December 2024.

The file is 828 pages long and more than 250,000 words. Dennis often says he has family commitments, problems with his vehicle, blames illness or offers other excuses when asked by the couple why work isn’t starting up. And he constantly apologizes.

Bhat and Lobo consistently ask Dennis for updates on when he will work on their home or meet deadlines that are extended and then extended again. Dennis often apologizes for not completing work during the agreed-upon schedule — dates listed by Bhat — and promises to do better.

‘Trevor, we are having panic attacks’

In text exchanges with Dennis, Lobo (Cookie in the chat) and Bhat express frustration with the delays and deadlines for completion of work missed by Dennis, who promised to finish the ground floor by Nov. 24, then by Christmas, then by Jan. 3 and then again by Jan. 12.

Here is a text file from Jan. 3, 2024:

• 2024-01-03, 4:51 p.m. — Cookie: We shall just wait and see if anything happens tomorrow Trevor. I am EXHAUSTED from these chats.
• 2024-01-03, 4:52 p.m. — Raj: Omg it’s moved from Nov 24, Xmas, Jan 3 to Jan 12
• 2024-01-03, 4:53 p.m. — Raj: That’s a big excuse not to meet us and explain. Really uncomfortable?
• 2024-01-03, 4:55 p.m. — Raj: Issue is its not happening as what you have promised. Nov 24, Xmas, Jan 3rd … so have to find out what’s going on.
• 2024-01-03, 4:55 p.m. — Raj: Now the date is moved to next Friday
• 2024-01-03, 4:55 p.m. — Raj: You agreed to meet once a week. That’s dead too.

On Feb., 21, 2024, in text message exchanges between Bhat and Dennis, Bhat says:

• 2024-02-21, 2:51 p.m. — Raj: Trevor, we are having panic attacks with this project. Not sure how to make you understand our situation and work toward completing it.
• 2024-02-21, 2:52 p.m. — Raj: There is a big gap in what you say and what you do. Having sleepless nights
• 2024-02-21, 2:53 p.m. — Raj: Don’t see end in sight.

Lobo and Bhat grew increasingly concerned when subcontractors reached out to them directly for payments, which they believed Dennis had handled through previous payments they had made to him.

When they questioned Dennis about these issues, they say they weren’t able to get a direct response or were told payments had been made. When they checked with many of the subcontractors, they were told Dennis still had not fully paid them.

While all this was going on, Lobo and Bhat didn’t know Dennis was in trouble over previous contracted jobs.

The contractor was embroiled in a battle with his Whitby neighbours over a deal for a renovation inked in May 2022. And he was also in another dispute for more than $370,000 over a renovation he started in Toronto in mid-2021.

The deal with Dennis’s Whitby neighbours, Tanya McCord and Chris Checchin, had gone off the rails by June 2023 due to many of the same problems that plagued the Lobo-Bhat renovation soon after it started.

It’s all thoroughly detailed in a 78-page report they compiled and also in a statement of claim Dennis did not challenge in court: missed deadlines, a lack of accountability by Dennis as requested by the couple and what they say was his inability to account for where funds they paid him were spent.

They also showed in a detailed report that the contractor had not paid all the subcontractors who worked on their project.

In each case, both couples called on Dennis to provide a full spreadsheet of where he had spent money they had paid him for their projects and what for; but, despite numerous requests month after month, Dennis never fully complied, both couples said.

Just five days before he took on the Renfield Crescent job with Lobo and Bhat July 20, 2023, the frustrated Whitby neighbours decided to go to a lawyer to sue Dennis for lack of progress on their job.

In June 2023, they told him they wanted to dissolve their agreement because he’d failed to meet its agreed-upon terms. When Dennis didn’t dispute their statement of claim against him, which includes a detailed explanation of all the missed timelines and jobs not competed, they were awarded a default judgment of $65,872 in May 2024.

Dennis struggled with terms of the contracts he agreed to with all three couples: that he provide a “dedicated site foremen for the duration of the job” and have “weekly site meetings to ensure schedule and decisions are on time with site foremen and management team.”

He did neither, according to Lobo and Bhat. Nor did he do so with the Whitby neighbours or the Toronto couple he worked for before the Whitby renos.

All three mention in either text messages, reports or statements of claim, that they wanted refunds on work they believed was not completed by Dennis, but didn’t receive any.

In the Feb. 19 interview, Dennis was asked about having an on-site foreman and arranging weekly in-person meetings with his clients.

“There are certain reasons at each project at certain times why a foreman wasn’t there.”

Asked why he includes these clauses as part of his 20 per cent contracting fee, he said: “Because it typically happens (that the terms are included in the contract).”

For Carla Silva and Antonio Alberga and their children, the issues in their Toronto home were similar in some respects to what happened in the Whitby renovations.

They signed up with Dennis in March 2021 for a large home renovation that was to involve their entire residence and take about a year. They made plans to live elsewhere, secure in the belief Dennis would meet the timelines agreed upon. It was expected the job would be done by late spring 2022.

It wasn’t.

Silva, Alberga and their children were forced to rent a condo at their own cost for five months after the agreed-upon deadline came and went. They spent a miserable 2022 Christmas season in a hotel, Silva recalls.

They finally moved back in January 2023, more than 18 months after the job began and nearly two years after signing the contract with Dennis.

‘It was unlivable, but we had no choice’

“We moved in with my kids to a construction zone. Basically, it was unlivable, but we had no choice because we had nowhere else to go,” she said.

As 2023 dragged on, Silva said she and Alberga grew increasingly frustrated that the work wasn’t getting completed.

“In the spring of 2023, while working through our lawyer, we were contacted by several subcontractors and vendors who hadn’t been paid despite Trevor’s claims that he had settled with them. Many of these vendors are also listed in his bankruptcy documents,” Silva said in a recent email response.

The couple eventually took Dennis to small claims court, winning a default judgment of $27,322.95 in October 2023 when Dennis didn’t respond to their statement of claim.

In the Feb. 19 interview, when the subject of the other two couples was raised, Dennis dismissed the situations, calling them, “not similar in any way.”

He expressed a reluctance to discuss those prior projects and didn’t feel he had any obligation to divulge his ongoing problems with the other couples to Lobo and Bhat, who said they asked him if he faced any lawsuits or legal issues before agreeing to sign with him.

Bhat and Lobo, frustrated after their experience with Dennis, filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery in October 2024 and met with Durham Regional Police.

After talking to police, they said they were told their case doesn’t warrant a criminal investigation, but is, instead, a civil matter and to consult with a lawyer.

Lobo was very disappointed.

‘I have no faith in the system’

“I have no faith in the system,” she said, noting she wants to see more consumer protection for homeowners who sign contracts that appear to have little legal weight behind them.

Lobo and Bhat felt like they appealed to all the proper channels, but, in the end, were left on their own to fight their own battle.

It hurts Lobo to see her daughters confined to their bedrooms for more than 18 months with inadequate living space on the ground floor.

Rachel has had her bedroom double as the family’s kitchen since September 2023.

“I’m tired of living like this, where I don’t have any room to do anything. I can’t do my school work properly or practise my music properly,” Rachel said. “Why did you do this to us?”

‘Why did you do this to us?’

As of three weeks ago, Lobo and Bhat and their daughters were living on their second floor out of their three bedrooms, and the cluttered, messy main floor — which still lacks a bathroom and other necessities — goes mostly unused.

As for the backyard addition, it’s getting done, but isn’t there yet.

Bhat and Lobo were shocked to discover Dennis Design and Build, with Trevor Dennis as sole proprietor, filed for bankruptcy Dec. 30, 2024.

Among the creditors is the City Wide Group, which partly dug the hole and provided the foundation for the Lobo-Bhat backyard unit. It is owed $48,000, according to the bankruptcy filing.

City Wide Group put a lien on Lobo and Bhat’s home last fall for $43,675. Chris Cavan of City Wide Group said in a phone interview Dec. 5 he was still owed this amount by Dennis.

To add to their mounting costs, Lobo and Bhat were served Feb. 14 with a statement of claim by the City Wide Group — Trevor Dennis is included as well — for $43,675.

They are concerned they could face more costs due to other potential unpaid subtrades that appear on the bankruptcy document. They have studied the document and traced the creditors to work done on their home.

To finish the work Dennis didn’t do, Bhat secured another bank line of credit for $175,000 to finish the the work.

“My credit rating took a hit. I had to do some bridge financing to make this happen. I went from zero risk to very high risk in just two years,” he said.

Conditions are turning around for the better at the home, thanks to Jerry Stockla and his crew, who’ve been working on finishing the work on the home.

‘He’s done more in … a month than Trevor did’

“He’s done more in just over a month than Trevor did in a year,” said Lobo, who said Stockla has told her he believes the project can be finished by the end of March.

The experience has been life-altering for Lobo and Bhat, whose sense of trust has been shaken.

For Lobo, her hope is to get back all her catering customers after being out of the business for nearly two years and to get a cooking school going in her new backyard kitchen.

Also on the creditors list of the Dennis Design and Build Bankruptcy filing: Both of the couples who were awarded judgments against him.