The Condo Board Stopped the Job Halfway

The stop order

At 2:05 in the afternoon, on the first day of an air conditioning replacement, the board president of a 12-unit condominium emailed the unit owner and the building manager: work on the building exterior was to stop immediately, the new opening in the exterior wall was unauthorized, and the association reserved its rights under the declaration. The crew had already removed the old system, set the new outdoor unit on the ground beside the building, cored a new hole through the exterior wall and run half the line set down the facade. It was August, and the third-floor unit had no cooling.

The shop's service manager reconstructed what happened the next morning, from the job record, because nobody on the crew could say who had approved what. The record answered most of it. The gaps in it answered the rest.

The record, as it stood that afternoon

INTAKE  07/29  call from owner, Unit 3B
  "Condo 3rd fl. Replace 2-ton split. Owner says
   HOA fine with it."
QUOTE   07/31  signed by owner
  Replace split system. Relocate condenser from
  balcony to grade for service clearance. New
  wall penetration, line set down exterior.
  10 crew-hours.
JOB     08/06
  08:10 arrived, owner present
  08:40 refrigerant recovered, old system out
  11:15 core drilled, ext wall, 3 in, wet core
  12:30 condenser set on pad at grade
  13:40 bldg manager on site, asked who approved
  14:05 email from board president: stop
  14:20 crew stopped, lead called office
NOT IN FILE: declaration, rules, insurance cert
  naming association, any board approval

Three things stand out before reading a word of the declaration. The intake note records the owner's belief, not an approval. The quote describes a change to the outside of the building in plain words, and nobody treated it as one. And the file holds nothing from the association at all.

What the declaration said

The manager sent the relevant sections that evening. Paraphrased, they said:

• Unit boundaries: each unit runs to the interior unfinished surfaces of its perimeter walls, floors and ceilings. Everything outside that line, including the exterior walls, the roof and the grounds, is a common element owned by all owners together.
• Limited common elements: each balcony, and HVAC equipment serving a single unit located on that unit's balcony, are limited common elements assigned to that unit.
• Maintenance: each owner maintains, repairs and replaces the HVAC equipment serving their unit, wherever located, at their own cost.
• Alterations: no owner shall alter, penetrate, or install anything on the common elements without prior written approval of the board. The association may restore unauthorized alterations at the owner's expense.
• Rules: contractors register with management 48 hours before starting and provide a certificate of insurance naming the association.

Read against the record, the job split cleanly in two. Replacing the equipment was the owner's right and obligation: the old condenser sat on the balcony, a limited common element, and the declaration put its replacement on the owner. Had the crew set a new condenser on the balcony using the existing wall penetration, there would have been nothing for the board to approve beyond contractor registration. The relocation was a different act: a new hole in an exterior wall and equipment on the grounds, both common elements, both requiring prior written approval that nobody had requested.

The general vocabulary of unit, common element and limited common element is owned by the related condo card; what matters here is that one job contained both kinds of work and was approved as if it contained only one.

Reading the gaps

"Owner says HOA fine with it." Asked about it, the owner forwarded a message from the manager, three weeks earlier, answering "can I replace my AC?" with "yes, like-for-like replacements are fine, just have the contractor register with me." The owner was telling the truth. The approval was real, and it covered a balcony replacement, not a relocation. The intake note compressed a conditional approval into an unconditional one, and nobody downstream had reason to doubt it.

The relocation itself. The salesperson chose grade placement because the new unit, a different footprint from the old one, would not meet the manufacturer's service clearances on the balcony. That was a sound technical call made without asking whether the place it moved the equipment to belonged to the customer. The quote said "relocate condenser" and "new wall penetration" in so many words; the signature on it was the owner's, and the owner had no authority to approve either.

No certificate, no registration. The crew arrived without registering, which the manager would have caught 48 hours earlier, along with the relocation, if the rules had been followed. The rule existed precisely to put the plan in front of the manager before any work.

What the record did well. It timed every event, which made the reconstruction possible in an hour. It recorded that the core was drilled wet (which controls the silica dust that dry coring through masonry releases), and that refrigerant was recovered before removal. Those entries were never in dispute.

Making the site safe and the owner cool

The service manager's first decisions were containment, priced in crew-hours, before anyone discussed fault.

• The opening. An open 3-inch core in an exterior wall lets water into the wall cavity of the unit below in the first rain. With the manager's agreement, the lead installed a sleeve and sealed it with a temporary weatherproof cap the same afternoon, photographed. About 1 crew-hour.
• The equipment. The new condenser holds its factory refrigerant charge behind closed service valves; the crew left the valves closed, capped both ends of the partial line set to keep moisture and debris out, and left the unit's electrical disconnect unconnected and its whip unterminated. About 1 crew-hour.
• The owner. A loaner portable air conditioner was delivered that evening for the main bedroom, vented through a window insert. About 1 crew-hour.

Containment cost 3 crew-hours and stopped further damage, and the owner could sleep. Fault came after.

How it was resolved

The service manager, the owner and the building manager met on site two days after the stop. The shop brought a written plan for two paths and asked the board to choose:

1. Approve the relocation as built, with the line set enclosed in a painted cover matching the facade and the core permanently sealed by the method the board's building envelope contractor specified.
2. Restore the balcony location with a compact condenser model that met the manufacturer's clearances there, reusing the existing wall penetration, and patch the new core.

The board met in special session nine days after the stop. It declined path 1: the grade location sat beside the patio of the ground-floor unit, whose owner objected to the noise, and the board did not want to set a precedent for equipment on the shared grounds. It approved path 2, on the condition that the association's own masonry contractor patch the core and the cost be borne by the unit owner under the declaration's restoration clause.

Who paid. The declaration put the restoration on the owner. The shop's view was that the relocation was its own design decision, made without checking whether the location was the customer's to offer, so it reimbursed the owner for the patch and absorbed its own extra labor. That was a business decision about a customer relationship, not a concession of legal liability, and the shop's insurance agent was told about the wall penetration in case the unit below reported water damage. Whether an association can pursue a contractor directly, fine an owner, or enforce a restoration clause in a given state is a question for the parties' own attorneys; state condominium statutes, many based on the Uniform Condominium Act or the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act and others written from scratch, as in Florida's Chapter 718, differ in what they allow. This is not legal advice.

The final count. The compact condenser arrived eight days after approval, and the install was completed the next day.

Eighteen crew-hours against a 10-hour quote, 80% over, plus the patch reimbursement and 18 days from the stop to working cooling (9 days to the board's decision, 8 days to the part, 1 day to install).

What the intake should have caught

The fix the shop adopted is three questions at intake for any attached or multi-unit property, and one trigger at the quote:

• "Is this a condo, co-op or HOA property, and do you own the unit or rent it?"
• "Has the association approved this, and can you forward what they said?" The written approval goes in the file, so its conditions are visible to whoever designs the job.
• "Can you send us the contractor rules or the manager's contact?" Registration and the insurance certificate get handled before scheduling.

The quote trigger: any line containing "relocate," "new penetration," "exterior," "roof," "balcony" or "common" on a multi-unit job holds the quote until the association's approval for that specific change is on file. The trigger catches exactly the case in this record: a technically sound decision, described honestly on the quote, that changed who had to approve the work.

References

• Uniform Condominium Act and Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act (Uniform Law Commission), as adopted in some states; Florida Statutes, Chapter 718, as an example of a state-specific condominium act.
• EPA Section 608 refrigerant management requirements (40 CFR Part 82, Subpart F): recovery before opening a system.
• See related: Condo and Multifamily Work: Whose Property Is It.
• See related: The Multifamily Building Job Intake SOP.
• See related: Co-ops and Alteration Agreements.