› Flat Chat Strata Forum › Talkin’ ’bout a renovation › Hard Flooring – By-Law Interpretation › Current Page
Fuzzy – without reading the entire By-Law, it seems to me that your Owners Corporation (O/C) is trying to ensure that for (valid) reasons of preventing so far as is possible the transmission of “impact noise” from Unit to Unit, that floorcoverings are replaced on a like-for-like basis.
So clearly that objective as legitimised in your Plan’s (special) By-Law rules out all of your listed options, but have you considered high quality vinyl (and cat-friendly) flooring laid over underlay of similar quality (6 star)?
As a compromise following on-going noise complaints, a couple of first floor Units in our Plan were given consent to replace cheap floating floors with a vinyl product, and after almost 3 years we’ve had no further complaints and the finished product looks great; one actually looks like polished concrete!
I have the names of the suppliers, but as neither was engaged by me and there are numerous numbers of them in NSW and elsewhere, I’ll not disclose those.
Should you decide to go the way of vinyl, I suggest in the strongest possible terms that your spec. to anyone from whom you obtain quotations includes a requirement for the combination of their vinyl product and underlay to have an “impact noise rating” (Ln,w) that’s at least equivalent to the 30-35 achieved by carpet / underlay over a 200mm concrete raft slab; that’s entirely achievable by a supplier who knows what they’re doing!
(Oh, and when you have time, perhaps read this from earlier forum discussions on the topic).