A family practice. A personal approach.

James runs the build. He walks every house before we price it, runs the crew and the trades, and deals with the building department and the inspector. Our designer at Juliette Interiors runs the design: she measures, draws the floor plans and builds the 3D model, then narrows the finishes to a few that suit you and presents the samples in our office. Because they're married, the design and the build are worked out together.

I grew up on job sites. My grandfather was an architect and my dad started this business, so I learned early that a house is only as good as the parts you can't see.

Now I run the construction and my wife runs the design. She draws it, I build it, and neither of us is waiting on the other company to call back.

When you're working in an old house, you never know what's behind the wall until it's open. So when we find something, you hear what it is and what it costs before we fix it. On Bellamy we found asbestos, fire hazards and a point load in the basement, and we still handed the house back on the day we said we would.

If you can, do it all at once. It's faster, it's cleaner and it costs less than coming back later for the next room.

And if something we did isn't right, we fix it. On one job the stair stain didn't match the new floor. The homeowner had approved the colour, but neither of us liked it, so we refinished the stairs.

James Jarvis

Jarvis Contracting is rated 4.9 from 28 Google reviews as of 5 October 2026 (Google), and 5 out of 5 from 6 reviews on HomeStars. The Better Business Bureau lists the company as accredited, rated A+, since 28 November 2025 (BBB). Since October 2026 we've been a member of the Durham Region Home Builders' Association (DRHBA) and a RenoMark renovator (RenoMark). The family firm's older Houzz profile earned Best of Houzz for service in 2017 and 2018 (Houzz).

James and his wife talked about working together as a husband-and-wife team on The Construction Life podcast, episode 647 (21 October 2024).