The thing about writing lists is that no sooner have you finished it than you want to add something else.
My Flat Chat column in the Herald and AFR about the little things in strata that annoy you a lot, caught a few eyes and elicited some highly irritated responses (which you can read HERE).
But no sooner had I written it than I had another one I wanted to add. Some moron in my own building has ignored several pleas from the EC and signs in the garbage chute rooms asking people not to drop bottles down there.
But this idiot, who hasn’t grasped basic concepts like community – or even gravity – dropped a wine bottle from anything between 5 and 18 floors up and nearly took our cleaner’s eye out when it smashed and flew across the garbage room.
And just a few days before, another failed lobotomy victim dropped a whole house plant, pot and all, down the chute.
Our EC is now seriously considering locking off the garbage chutes because our employees lives, as well as the equipment they look after, are being endangered. It’s a last resort but I’ve lived in two buildings where it was done for exactly those reasons.
Makes you think, doesn’t it: in a few weeks, these same people will be allowed – sorry, obliged – to vote in a general election. Lucky we don’t have Trump here.
Anyway, enough of that. The collective brains trust that is the Flat Chat Forum has been wrestling with a whole new collection of curly ones for your entertainment and edification.
- If your Owners Corp hires a solicitor to fight a you at the tribunal and you win, do you have to pay a share of their costs through your levies? It depends where you live.
- Can a downstairs neighbours fern be allowed to grow so high it blocks your view? That’s HERE?
- Who gets to access addresses on the strata roll – and do they include email addresses? That’s HERE.
- How can you have a ‘paper EGM’ when people have a right to attend meetings? That’s HERE?
- Is size a reasonable restriction of dogs, especially when small yappy dogs cause more problems than large quiet ones? That’s HERE.
As ever, there’s a lot more on the Flat Chat forum and you can read the column in Domain in the Fin Review on Fridays, the Sydney Morning Herald every Saturday and, of course, online too. Oh, and thanks to Shakespeare whose cartoons are invariably funnier than my columns.
