Defining Minor Renovations

Copperhead wrote:

If our Owners Corp approves a list of what we consider to be “minor” modifications, providing the approval process was done properly and on record, would future owners be legally responsible for those modifications?

I’m not sure that anything that affects common property can be considered a “minor” modification.  And if the changes don’t affect common property then the responsibility for them lies with the lot owners.

I assume not and therefore “minor” modifications would need to be carefully thought through and not venture into areas that might be considered “major” that would require a by-law to attach ongoing responsibility to future owners.

Fair Trading’s Common Property Memorandum is a good place to start and strata law allows you to adopt that in one fell swoop via a by-law. By the way the regulation supporting it specifically forbids redefining what is and isn’t common property.

If we then wanted to approve a list of “major” modifications in one bylaw, can we do this? Or do we have to take out separate ByLaws for each item?

I’m not sure that a strata scheme can use by-laws to reassign what is minor or major modifications.

And you need to have separate by-laws for each reno project to some extent because the lot owner must agree to take responsibility for the changes they make to common property.  You really don’t want the owners corp to be stuck with responsibility for changes made during a reno, which is the default position if the owner doesn’t sign up to a common property by-law.

This would certainly be worth running past a strata lawyer (have a look at the ads on this page) but I would suggest that you might be able to draw up a catch-all by-law that allowed changes under the terms of Section 109, Section 110 and Section 111 of the Act and Section 27 (Common Property Memorandum) and Section 28 of the Regulations, plus but not exclusively, any changes specific to that project.

Thus you could have something approaching an off-the-peg common property rights by-law that could be easily adapted for each particular owner and their project.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by .

Absolutely correct, my mistake. I just wonder about self-interested committee members pushing through by-laws for acceptance by unwitting (or unengaged) owners that magically turn major renovations into minor ones.