When a Roof Leak Shut Down a Contracting Business

The situation

Anne worked days at a call centre and Zofia drove transit shifts, but most evenings and every weekend belonged to the small renovation business they had built together over four years, doing everything from bathroom remodels to custom shelving for neighbours and friends of friends. What began as weekend work to supplement two modest incomes had grown, job by job and referral by referral, into something that covered a real share of the household bills. They leased a modest flex-industrial unit in Mississauga — roughly 900 square feet of workshop and storage space where they kept tools, lumber, tile, and the odd half-finished cabinet job. The rent was about $2,200 a month, a stretch when they first signed the lease three years earlier but comfortably affordable now that the business was finally turning a real profit and had built up a small waiting list of clients.

Marek had owned the building longer than Anne and Zofia had been tenants, and the relationship, until that point, had been unremarkable in the way a good landlord relationship usually is: rent went in on time, minor repair requests were handled within a reasonable window, and neither side gave the other much thought. Anne and Zofia had no complaints about the building going into that spring, and no reason to expect the coming weeks would put the lease to any kind of test.

That changed the week Marek brought in a crew to replace an aging section of roof over their unit and the one next door. The work was reasonable on its face — the roof needed it, and Marek had given the usual short notice tenants get for exterior maintenance — but the execution was not. A tarp came loose overnight during a rainstorm, and water poured through the exposed section directly onto Anne and Zofia's stored materials and two power tools.

The problem

The immediate damage was bad enough: soaked drywall stock, a ruined table saw, and a shop vacuum that never ran again. But the bigger cost was time. The unit was declared unsafe to enter for several days while the roof was patched, and even after that, dehumidifiers and repair crews occupied the space on and off for close to ten weeks. Anne and Zofia could not store materials there, could not meet clients on site, and had to decline two renovation contracts because they had nowhere to stage the work.

Under most commercial leases, a tenant has an implied right to what is called quiet enjoyment — the ability to use the rented space for its intended purpose without unreasonable interference from the landlord. When a landlord's own actions, or a landlord's failure to fix a known problem, make a unit unusable, the tenant can often claim an abatement: a reduction in rent proportional to the loss of use, sometimes alongside compensation for direct property damage. The proportion matters — an abatement is not automatically the full rent for the affected period, and exactly how much of a unit was actually unusable, and for how long, is usually the first thing a landlord will dispute.

Anne and Zofia asked Marek for a rent credit covering the period the unit was substantially unusable, plus reimbursement for the ruined tools and materials. Marek's position was that the roof failure was an accident, that repairs are a normal part of leasing older commercial space, and that the lease did not obligate him to compensate tenants for weather damage during routine maintenance. He offered nothing beyond a token gesture toward the tool replacement, and months went by without a resolution. Phone calls turned into unanswered emails, and a promised follow-up inspection kept getting pushed back another week.

By the time Anne and Zofia came to Treadstone Law, the relationship with their landlord had soured, but the lease still had over a year left to run and they did not want to be forced out of the space entirely. That constraint shaped the whole strategy. This was never going to be a case where the goal was simply to extract the largest possible number and walk away — Anne and Zofia needed a resolution they could keep operating under, in a building they still had to occupy through the end of their term.

What we did

1. Reviewed the lease for the actual terms governing repairs and interruption. Many commercial leases put the burden of structural repairs, including roofs, on the landlord, while making the tenant responsible for interior fixtures. We confirmed the roof fell squarely within Marek's obligations, and that nothing in the lease waived the tenant's right to an abatement when the landlord's repair work — or a landlord's negligence in supervising it — made the space unusable.
2. Documented the loss with a clear timeline. We worked with Anne and Zofia to reconstruct exactly which days the unit was inaccessible or unsafe, cross-referenced against the roofing contractor's own work orders, which Marek was required to produce. We also gathered receipts and replacement-cost estimates for the damaged tools and materials, and photographs Zofia had taken the morning after the leak.
3. Sent a demand letter framing the claim around quiet enjoyment and abatement, not just property damage. This distinction mattered. A damage claim alone might have been treated as a routine insurance matter. Framing part of the claim as lost use of the premises put pressure on Marek to negotiate, since an unresolved abatement dispute could affect the enforceability of future rent demands if it ever went to court.
4. Prepared to file in Small Claims Court while continuing settlement talks. With the total claim — lost use plus damaged property — sitting at roughly $10,500, Small Claims Court was the right forum: it handles claims up to a set monetary limit without the cost of a full civil action. We drafted the claim and gave Marek a firm deadline to respond before it was issued, which moved the conversation from stalled to active within days.
5. Negotiated a settlement that reflected both sides' real positions. Marek maintained the leak was an accident outside his control, which had some force since the immediate cause was a contractor's tarp, not his own hands. We countered that a landlord remains responsible for a contractor's work on his own building. The compromise split the difference: a rent credit for six of the ten impaired weeks, plus full replacement value for the tools and about half the claimed materials loss, since some stock had already been partially used before the leak.

The outcome

Anne and Zofia recovered about $7,600 in total — roughly $4,200 as a rent credit applied against future months, and about $3,400 for the ruined table saw, shop vacuum, and materials. It was less than the full $10,500 they had documented, and less than they felt they deserved given how much business they had turned away during the disruption. But it resolved the dispute without a trial, preserved the lease they still needed for another year of business, and came with a written acknowledgment from Marek that future repair work required proper notice and weatherproofing.

That last point mattered as much as the money. Small Claims Court judgments do not automatically fix a landlord-tenant relationship, and Anne and Zofia still had to work under this lease for another year. A negotiated settlement with clear terms about future repairs gave them something a bare damages award would not have: a functioning working relationship with the person who owned the roof over their heads, and some assurance that the next round of maintenance would not repeat the same mistake.

The business survived the disruption, though the ten lost weeks left a mark. Anne and Zofia had to turn away two contracts they could not staff without their workshop, and rebuilding that pipeline took the rest of the year — new clients do not always wait for a small operation to get back on its feet, and word travels both ways in a trades community built on referrals. The settlement covered their direct losses reasonably well; it could not fully replace the momentum a small business loses when it goes dark for two and a half months in what should have been its busiest stretch of the year.

Looking back, Anne and Zofia said the part that had frustrated them most in the weeks before they called a lawyer was not the damage itself but the silence that followed it — weeks of vague reassurances from Marek with nothing in writing and no real timeline for when the space would be usable again. Once the claim was framed properly, around quiet enjoyment rather than simply a request for reimbursement, that silence ended within days. They kept the lease, kept most of their client list, and went into the following year with a landlord relationship that, while never quite the same as before the leak, was at least back on a working footing with clear expectations on both sides.

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