Hello. My partner and I are in one of those nightmare situations where our upstairs neighbours installed tiles onto what is a thin concrete slab without any insulation and we desperately need some advice as we are at the tribunal stage at the CTTT.
Some background:
The neighbours have twin boys who they let run throughout the apartment all day often until 10.30pm or even 11pm on occasion. The running and dropping of toys or people walking around in heels is an absolute nightmare. Their reply to being asked to do something about their floor and to stop the kids running was “bad luck that’s apartments for you.” They have no sympathy for us below and have resisted every request to do something about the floor and to curtail their behaviour. They view us as troublemakers.
We went to mediation and then on to adjudication and produced videos, a detailed noise diary and stat decs as evidence. They were ordered to cover every hard surface or otherwise treat the floor sufficiently to prevent disturbance – a vague order (what a pathetic system!).
All they did was buy a hall runner and put a rug in the loungeroom. which has done little to rectify the noise. We applied for a penalty breach of orders. The first trip to the tribunal the registrar stormed into the hearing room in a grumpy mood and said what are we hear for? He had not looked at our application or read any of the background. when we replied why we are here he yelled at us “what do you want me to do about it?!” we were shocked. The hearing was adjourned because the one of the other parties had not turned up and they had not supplied us with their evidence.
The second attempt at a hearing a different registrar was actually personable but refused to look at any of our evidence until we had conducted professional acoustic testing of their floor and ordered them to give us access to their place. She said she would not put herself in a position to judge the recordings we made because it is too subjective. I replied that there are precedents where other registrars have decided without video evidence that laying a thin rug that doesn’t cover all surfaces is not sufficiently treating the floor, yet she would have none of it.
Now we have heard from a company we have approached that the tap test they do probably wont help us as the BCA acoustic standards are so poor that there is a chance that with the rugs they might comply. We are super worried that if this is the case and the registrar does not take into account our recordings, noise diary and stat decs that we will have wasted all this time and money and have to sell our place. We are not sensitive people, the noise is extremely disturbing. No one would live under those conditions. We would have trouble renting the place out in the current situation.
What would be our best argument to the tribunal if the acoustic report shows compliance to the BCA standards? We have endured hell getting this far and putting up with their noise the whole time. It broke my heart when the acoustic company told us that their report mightn’t help us much.
Help!!!