A Burnaby couple has four months to pull up some recently laid laminate flooring in their townhouse after losing a Civil Resolution Tribunal battle with their strata council.
Andrea and Elijah Beretta replaced the flooring in their 1975 Fraser Hills "maisonette" (an apartment with its own ground-level entry) on Aries Place in November 2020, according to a CRT ruling last week.
Soon, however, there was a “rumour circulating” the Berettas had installed laminate flooring where laminate flooring was forbidden, namely the living room, hallway and dining room, according to the ruling.
The couple was confronted by the strata council president in an email, and the case eventually landed in the front of the tribunal.
The strata applied to the CRT for an order forcing the Berettas to remove the offending laminate because it violates strata bylaws.
Owners of maisonettes are forbidden from installing “hard surface flooring” above the first floor except in kitchens, bathrooms and entrance halls, according to bylaws cited in the ruling.
The Berettas admitted they had installed the laminate where laminate should not be but argued their unit had had laminate in those areas before the bylaw was passed.
Further, they argued they had informed the strata ahead of time that they would be replacing the flooring “like-for-like,” with laminate and carpeting where they had existed before, and the strata had raised no objections.
But tribunal vice chair Kate Campbell sided with the strata.
While the strata’s bylaws allow owners to keep all hard surface flooring installed before 2008, Campbell ruled there is nothing in the bylaws that permits “like-for-like” replacement of old hard flooring with new hard flooring.
She also ruled the Berettas had not been specific enough about their plans to put laminate where it was not allowed, and it was therefore unreasonable for the Berettas to have expected the strata to kibosh their plans before the flooring was installed.
“Since the Berettas’ correspondence with the strata did not explicitly say where they planned to install laminate flooring, I find their expectation was unreasonable,” Campbell said in the Feb. 17 ruling.
Campbell gave the Berettas four months to replace any laminate that wasn’t in the kitchen, bathroom or entrance hall, and ordered the couple to pay the strata $225 in tribunal fees.
The CRT is an online, quasi-judicial tribunal that hears strata property disputes and small claims cases.
Follow Cornelia Naylor on Twitter @CorNaylor
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