Overcoming flooring impact isolation performance failures due to adjacent condominium ceiling deficiencies

Abstract

There is an increasing demand to renovate apartments and condominiums by installing hard-surfaced flooring. It has become typical for a homeowner’s association (HOA) to enact regulations requiring that upper level dwelling units making flooring upgrades from soft-surface flooring to hard-surface flooring meet specific minimum field impact insulation class (FIIC) or impact sound rating (ISR) performance standards. It is common for these HOA requirements to apply only to the party making the flooring surface change. It is rare that the adjacent ceiling condition or ceiling renovation is addressed by such HOA requirements. This paper presents field performance test results for several renovated condominiums in different multi-family residential buildings that failed homeowner’s association impact performance requirements due to lower-level ceiling deficiencies. Examples of such failures are discussed and successful custom remedies are presented, some of which avoided threatened litigation.