Your upstairs neighbours are in clear violation of your scheme’s by-laws. You are right to want to talk to a specialist strata lawyer about this as your neighbours seem happy to dissemble and obfuscate to keep their precious floor boards. Judging by others’ experiences, this will probably get nastier before it is resolved so hang in there and remember these points:
1. They are in the wrong, not you.
2. They have lied and will probably do so again to collect as much evidence as you can.
3. They have enhanced the value of their property at the expense of yours.
4. If they have to rip up the floorboards or relay carpet and insulation, it’s their fault, not yours.
5. A Tribunal will probably only order them to fix the problem – it may not instruct them on how to do that. However, the fact remains that there is no better insulation than carpet on top of quality underlay, so be prepared for a couple of visits to NCAT before the idiots upstairs finally get the message.
6. Don’t be afraid to explain to them that they can do this the easy way – fix it properly now – or the hard way: spend thousands of dollars on lawyers and end up having to fix it properly anyway. Either way, they should start planning on how they are going to remedy a problem they have caused.
THE CTTT used to be notoriously lax on the floorboards issue, with Members who had apparently never set foot in an apartment – let alone lived in one – blithely ruling that noise was a part of apartment living. You don’t hear that so much these days. Your scheme has a very good by-law that has been breached and that is all that they should be interested in.