Getting Flooring Approved in a Humber Bay Shores Condo

To change the flooring in a Humber Bay Shores condo, you need your own board's written approval before work starts, and every tower along Lake Shore Blvd W sets its own rules. Plan on an application, the floor's acoustic paperwork, booked elevator time and quiet hours. Here is how that plays out in this neighbourhood's buildings.

Every Humber Bay tower writes its own flooring rules

Humber Bay Shores packs a couple dozen towers between the Humber River and Mimico Creek, south of the Gardiner. They look like one neighbourhood from the Martin Goodman Trail, but on paper they are separate condominium corporations, each with its own declaration, rules and renovation policy.

The clearest example sits at the east end. Palace Pier, at 2045 Lake Shore Blvd W, went up in 1978 on the site of the old amusement pier. Palace Place, the tower beside it, followed in 1991. They share a site and a history, yet they are completely separate corporations. An approval from one management office means nothing in the other.

So the useful question is never what Humber Bay allows. It is what your corporation allows, and the answer is in a document your management office can send you.

What goes in a flooring application

Forms differ from tower to tower, but the requests repeat. Expect to supply most of this:

• The scope. Which rooms, roughly how many square feet, and what is coming out.
• The product. Its name and specification sheet, and the acoustic test report for the floor together with the underlay you plan to use.
• The method. Floating over an underlay or glued to the slab. Nail-down floors do not belong over concrete.
• The schedule. Proposed dates, working hours and the names of the trades who will be in the building.

The acoustic part is where applications stall. Many buildings set a minimum sound rating for the whole floor assembly so the suite below does not hear every footstep. We will not quote a number here, because the only number that matters is your building's. If you want the background on how those ratings work, our guide to condo flooring rules explains IIC and STC in plain terms.

Older towers and newer towers raise different questions

Humber Bay's buildings span almost fifty years, and the age of yours changes what the application has to cover.

The older towers

Palace Pier's 433 suites run from 920 to 3,595 square feet, so a single job there can be the size of a house. The floor you are replacing may be decades old, possibly with another layer underneath. Before 1990, asbestos was used in building materials, floor tiles among them, and Health Canada advises a professional test before renovating. Build that test into your timeline. If something is found, a qualified removal specialist goes first and the new floor waits.

The newer towers

Further west the towers get taller. Eau du Soleil at 30 Shore Breeze Dr has towers of 66 and 49 storeys and 1,285 units between them, and Vita on the Lake at 70 Annie Craig Dr rises 56 storeys. Here the old floor is usually the builder's original, and the hard part is logistics: hundreds of suites sharing service elevators that every move, delivery and renovation in the building has to book.

More is coming. Phase 1 of the former Christie cookie factory site at 2150 Lake Shore plans 2,003 units in towers of 47, 63 and 67 storeys, and those buildings will write rules of their own.

Elevator time, loading and quiet hours

In a 56 or 66 storey tower, every box of flooring goes up and every bag of old floor comes down in the service elevator, inside a window the management office books. Most buildings also want the elevator padded and set limits on noisy work such as cutting. Miss the window and the crew waits, so the booking is part of the plan, not an afterthought.

The service elevator is your booking with management, and we tell you which window to ask for and confirm the renovation hours. Moving furniture is its own line in the estimate, so you know before the day whether we are clearing the rooms or you are.

How long Humber Bay condo flooring approval takes

That depends on your management office, and no installer can honestly promise their turnaround. What you control is the order of steps. Nothing should be ordered until approval is in writing, because flooring bought for a rejected application is hard to send back.

1. Ask management for the flooring rules and the renovation application.
2. Narrow your choice to floors that clear those rules. SPC vinyl with an attached pad and engineered hardwood over a separate underlay are the usual candidates over a slab.
3. Submit the package with the acoustic report, then wait for written approval.
4. Measure, order, and book the elevator for install day.

Where Floorrable fits

We are an Etobicoke company with a showroom at 315A Humberline Dr, and Humber Bay is the neighbourhood we specialize in. Our Humber Bay condo flooring page covers the buildings in more depth. The building side is the work we take on for you: we ask for your corporation's rules, narrow the catalogue to floors that meet them, prepare the paperwork your board wants and tell you which elevator window to book.

The free online estimate asks for your building's name or address first, because in Humber Bay that is where every flooring job starts.