Situation About Our Apartment Unit, Major Renovation With Short Notice And Disturbance At Our Unit.

[BC, Canada] Our apartment unit(1st floor) was having issues from the renovation from the 2nd floor. This is causing major problems and disturbance to our family.

Back in November, our landlord gave us notice that they are going to move upstairs by January. By December 23rd, the landlord texted us that they will be renovating the 2nd floor unit instead by January 6th.

We didn’t know that it will be a major renovation such as removing all the walls, flooring, ceiling and changing the pipes and wires on that unit. He also added that he will be changing all the windows on the entire house including our unit. He warned us that the worker will be loud. We didn’t mind it at first bc most of us family our out at home from work/school during the day.

By the 2nd week of renovation, the workers accidentally destroyed our living room ceiling and has a HUGE gaping hole. I was at home at the time and I saw our living room full of dust and broken pieces. My father just got home from work and was very furious from what happened. Workers went downstairs and tried to cover the hole with wooden board. This caused us to be anxious whenever we get home, worrying it might happen again.

Few days after they are working on our bathroom side and created some holes again on the shower ceiling! We couldn’t even shower during the day bc the workers are upstairs. We tried to cover it with some tapes but it would absolutely be uncomfortable to use shower if ever.

This week they are working with water pipes and electricity and have to come in and out our unit bc the valve and breaker are inside our each bedrooms. They always leave a mess after they’re done. They’ve also added pipes in our living room to connect to the upstairs washroom. They’ve also added a new hole on our kitchen wall the we don’t know what for.

To add on that, the breaker keeps tripping whenever we used a heater, microwave, hairdryer or vacuum. There’s only 3 active switch out of 10 switch for the whole house. This has been a problem since we move in and the owner refuse to fix the breaker but willing to renovate the whole upstairs unit.

Up until now they still haven’t have floorings upstairs and still working on the pipes and wires.

We tried to be patient about this but my mom was reaching her limit. She tried to talk to the landlord and ask for a discounted rent bc this is not the house we used to live.

Can the landlord do this? Or was this allowed? We’ve been trying to find a new house to move in since last year but by the situation of rent/house prices we couldn’t afford leave yet.