Condo Board Approval for a Renovation: What They Ask For and How Long It Takes

You own the inside of your unit. You do not own the building it sits in, and almost everything worth renovating touches the boundary between the two — the floor assembly you share with the unit below, the risers in the wall, the corridor your material has to cross to get in.

In Ontario that boundary is set by your corporation's declaration, and the rules and by-laws layered on top of it. The declaration is the document that says where your unit legally ends. The rules are what the board can change on its own. Both matter, and they are not the same document — a scope that the rules permit can still be blocked by the declaration.

• Get the declaration and the current rules before you design anything. Your property manager will send both.
• If you are buying and plan to renovate, the status certificate package is where to look before closing, not after.
• Assume nothing transfers between buildings. Two towers by the same developer on the same street routinely have different flooring rules.
• Verbal approval from a property manager is not board approval. Get it in writing, on the corporation's form.

None of this is legal advice, and a renovation contractor is not the right person to interpret your declaration. What we can tell you is which parts of a scope reliably attract questions, and how to have the answers ready the first time.

Requirements vary by corporation, but the shape of the submission is remarkably consistent across the buildings we work in. Here is what to expect, and who produces each piece.

Allow one to two weeks for a straightforward approval, and book your contractor start date after you have it rather than before. That is the number we plan against and it holds for most packages that arrive complete.

The delays are almost never the board disliking your kitchen. They are administrative, and they are predictable.

• An incomplete package. It does not go into a queue and get partially reviewed — it comes back, and you start the clock again.
• An insurance certificate that does not name the corporation. Reissuing it is a day; noticing it took a week.
• Boards that only review at a monthly meeting. If yours does, the difference between submitting on the 3rd and the 5th can be four weeks.
• A structural or plumbing change that triggers engineer review, which happens before the board decides rather than after.
• Summer and December. Quorum is harder to get when trustees are away.

The practical version: submit early, submit complete, and ask the property manager one question — "when does the board next review alteration requests?" The answer reshapes your whole schedule.

Refusals cluster into a short list, and most of them are knowable before you submit.

• Hard flooring with no acoustic underlay, or an underlay whose rating is below what the rules require. The most common refusal by a wide margin.
• Removing a wall that turns out to be load-bearing or a demising wall between units. Interior partitions are often negotiable; these two are not.
• Relocating a toilet or a kitchen drain in a building where the stack cannot take it. This is a plumbing-reality refusal, not a policy one.
• Anything that alters the exterior appearance — window replacement, balcony finishes, an exterior vent through the wall.
• Work priced and scheduled to run outside permitted hours, which occasionally shows up in a submitted schedule and is refused on sight.

We confirm what a building allows before quoting layout changes, because a quote for work that will be refused is worse than no quote. If a wall or a drain move turns out to be off the table, the design changes at the drawing stage rather than on demolition day.

To be clear about the division of labour, because "we handle the board" is a claim worth interrogating whoever you hear it from.

• We produce the contractor-side documents: certificate of insurance naming your corporation, current WSIB clearance, underlay specifications, and the working-hours schedule.
• We coordinate directly with the property manager on elevator bookings, delivery windows, and protection of the common elements.
• We tell you at quoting stage which parts of your scope are likely to draw questions.
• We do not sign your alteration agreement, we do not interpret your declaration, and we cannot submit an owner's application on your behalf — the corporation deals with the unit owner.

The realistic split is that the paperwork about the crew is ours and the paperwork about the unit is yours. Agreeing that in the first conversation saves the week that otherwise disappears while each side assumes the other is filing.