UPDATE: |’Snoring builder first sign a family’s planned dream home was in trouble’ News

Trading standards have been contacted

A ‘snoring builder’ was the first sign a family’s planned dream home was in trouble, a mum has said. Tracy Daly and her partner, Robert Cannon have two young children and live with Tracy’s mum, Elaine Obrien.

But for the past year, Tracy and Robert have been sharing a mattress on the living room floor next to their kids, who sleep on a pull-out sofa bed.

While Tracy’s mum rests in a gutted front bedroom with no electricity or heating, the family spend the rest of their time in the overcrowded reception room downstairs. It is the only liveable area in the house and they must all use it to eat, sleep, work and play – a nightmare which has been ongoing for the last 15 months.

An investigation by the Liverpool ECHO has led to three families describing what happened after contracting a Kirkby-based firm for their renovation projects. They each claim to have entrusted their life savings to Celsius Home Improvements, but said they were left with half-finished, derelict properties, while company director, Frank Deary lived in his multi-million pound home in Aughton, West Lancashire.

All the claims made about Mr Deary in this article have been put to him. Specifically, we asked him about Celsius’ staff turning up to projects with no materials or plans of work.

Despite numerous efforts to reach him, Mr Deary has not provided any comments for publication, although at one stage he indicated he would do so.

The ordeal for Tracy and her family began in 2023 when Elaine decided to sell her home and invest her life savings – more than £70,000 – into creating a loft extension and ‘granny flat’ within her daughter’s house. At that time, Celsius was a member of FairTrades – an organisation which includes access to the government-endorsed TrustMark Scheme. The programme is designed to give homeowners reassurance by signposting them to vetted and accredited tradespeople for home improvements.

FairTrades and TrustMark then cancelled Celsius’ membership. In a letter to one complainant sent in June 2024 FairTrades wrote: “We made a decision to remove their membership as they failed to comply with both the FairTrades & TrustMark Code of Conduct – this became apparent due to a number of complaints we received in a short period.”

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Tracy said they paid the deposit in November 2023 and were told by Mr Deary the project would take ten weeks to complete. However, work didn’t start until January 2024 after they paid an additional 20 per cent of the job’s value.

Celsius finally sent someone to start work on January 15, Tracy added: “On day one, the builder turned up at 9am and asked us what needed doing as he had no instructions or job sheet, or even tools at this point.

“We told him he could start in the loft or the front bedroom which was being ripped out to become a wet room. He was in the loft until 11am then went for his dinner. He came back and went into the front bedroom, pulled up the carpet, ate his dinner, then rolled up a bit of carpet to sleep on. He slept there until 5pm when he was woken up by the guy picking him up to take him home.”

Tracy recalls she was busy downstairs whilst her partner, Rob, was working from home in one of the bedrooms which doubled up as an office. Rob said he heard snoring and went on the landing to investigate and found the worker snoring on the bathroom floor, according to Tracy, and he sent her a video to prove it.

Tracy added: “I saw it with my own eyes at 3pm when I picked my little girl up from nursery and took her to the toilet. She was scared and hid behind my legs and said ‘mummy why is that stranger sleeping on our floor, and why is he making that noise?’. She was three at the time and had no idea what was going on.”

Looking back, Tracy said it was the first in a long list of issues which resulted in them terminating Celsius’ contract, but only after losing tens of thousands of pounds and having their home left in a derelict condition. Tracy said: “It should have rung alarm bells then, but everything can be explained away with a bad employee story and an apology.

“We didn’t wake him up or make too much of a fuss at that point because it was day one of the job. I didn’t really want to rock the boat and hoped it was a one-off. I didn’t realise we were shown on day one the quality of the workmanship we could come to expect for the next 12 months!”

Tracy’s story is not unique. ECHO has uncovered a network of 28 households who claim they entrusted their savings to Celsius and are unhappy with the work done on their homes. Their combined financial outlay totals almost £1.5m. The 28 households connected through Instagram, Trustpilot, Google reviews and Facebook, eventually forming a WhatsApp support group. The ECHO met with 15 of these households and listened to their claims against Mr Deary’s companies.

According to customers and documents seen by the ECHO, Mr Deary’s companies were providing quotes post-2022 with Celsius branding but were trading as Clearmetric Ltd. A winding-up order was made against Clearmetric Ltd in the Manchester District Registry on January 7 this year – more than three years after Celsius Home Improvements was dissolved in February 2022.

The Insolvency Service (TIS) are currently looking into the matter with a letter from Official Receiver Carol Megram to customers stating: “This office is dealing with the winding-up of the company. She said: “I am the liquidator of the company responsible for realising any assets and distributing any funds to creditors. Also, I am responsible for investigating the cause of the company’s failure and its business, dealings and affairs.”

Trading Standards departments in Liverpool, Sefton, Knowsley, and Lancashire have all received complaints about Mr Deary and Celsius. Furthermore, a letter seen by the ECHO has confirmed complaints made against Mr Deary’s company to Sefton council have now been referred to the Regional Trading Standards Team.