u/Material-Push-5977

I own a ground-floor condo in BC. Our unit flooded after a blocked common drain in the parkade/common area. The plumber attended, cleared the blockage, and documented that it was a common-property drainage issue.

Strata arranged the plumber and emergency restoration company. The restoration company wanted to continue with demolition/asbestos testing etc., which seemed like it would take longer and cost more.

I emailed strata proposing that the restoration company invoice strata for work completed to date, and that our contractor complete the reconstruction instead. I said this would likely save time and money, and estimated the reconstruction at around $3–4k.
Before we proceeded, strata/council discussed it by email.

The email chain included:

- strata saying they may pay from strata funds,
- discussion about saving strata money,
- council voting on/approving the proposed repair cost/approach,
- and the instruction: “please tell him to proceed with the work.”

I also wrote that I did not think we needed to involve our personal insurance, and nobody corrected that.
Now that the work is done and the invoice exists, strata says they only approved our choice of contractor, not payment responsibility, and that interior finishes/improvements are owner responsibility under the bylaws.

Other context:

The strata president later said the parkade drains had not been cleaned in about 20 years.

We are a ground-floor unit, so common drainage backups are a bigger risk for us.

The building is older and council is now discussing broader plumbing replacement.

Does this sound like a reasonable CRT dispute in BC? Would the common drain blockage, lack of drain maintenance, and email approval/payment context support reimbursement, or is this likely treated as an owner-insurance/interior repair issue?

I kept running into the same issue building decks, getting decent claim maps together quickly without jumping into qgis every time. So I put together a simple tool that lets you upload shapefiles, style them, add callouts, and export clean maps for presentations.

It is called ExplorationMaps: https://www.explorationmaps.com/

Still early, no login, just trying to see if it is actually useful for others in the space. If you build decks, write reports, or follow juniors, would be interested in what works, what doesn’t, and whats missing.