Mold in a Boston Condo: Whose Element Did the Water Cross?

What the master deed splits

The master deed and the trust documents define where your unit stops and the common elements begin. In a typical conversion the unit is the space inside the perimeter walls, floor and ceiling, often measured to the inner face of the plaster or the studs. The roof, the foundation, the exterior walls, the framing, the common stairs and hallways, the cellar and any pipe or duct serving more than one unit are common.

Then there is the middle category, which is where arguments actually live: exclusive-use or limited common elements. A rear deck, a roof deck, a storage bay in the cellar, a parking space and in some buildings the windows and exterior doors. These are common elements only one owner uses. Whether the association or that owner maintains them varies from one master deed to the next.

Read your own set. Two three-deckers on the same Cambridge or Charlestown street, converted by different people in different years, can allocate the same deck or the same cellar bay differently. Whatever a neighbor tells you about their building is a description of their building.

Trace the path before you argue about the bill

Start where the water is rather than where the stain is. A wet ceiling on the top floor after a coastal storm points at the roof: a valley, a chimney flashing or a clogged drain on the rear low-slope section. All of those are common elements in most buildings, which makes the source the association's to stop even though the damaged plaster is inside your unit.

Damp along the base of a first-floor wall or in the joists above the cellar points down instead: the cellar wall, the grade outside it, the areaway drain, a downspout discharging where it should not. That is common area too. The growth still turns up in somebody's unit.

Some paths run the other way. A bathroom fan discharging into the joist bay or the knee-wall instead of outdoors is a unit fixture. The ceiling it wets often belongs to the neighbor below. A supply line inside your own wall is yours. A waste stack serving all three floors is not. Water from the unit above is usually that owner's problem, though the plumbing involved may still be common.

The complication nobody enjoys: two of these are often true at once. A roof leak wets the framing and a bath fan venting into the same cavity keeps it wet. A report that says so, in that order, saves a board and an owner from arguing about which one caused the smell.

The cellar is where a lot of this begins

In a converted three-decker in East Boston or Medford the cellar carries the whole building: the heating equipment or three separate units of it, the laundry, the water entry, storage cages and the underside of the first-floor apartment. It is also usually the dampest space in the building by a wide margin, since it sits against the ground on four sides and gets very little air.

That combination means a common element and a private unit share one surface. The joists over the cellar are the first-floor floor. The masonry pocket the joist ends sit in is common. The carpet on the other side is not. A first-floor owner smelling something in the morning is frequently smelling the cellar.

Access follows ownership. If the key sits with the trustees or a management agent, an inspector cannot simply go look. A report on your unit alone gets you halfway to the source at best. Ask for cellar access in writing when you book and copy the other owners so the request is on the record.

What a report needs to say to be useful to a board

A report that only records high moisture readings in a ceiling gives trustees nothing to act on. A report saying water is entering at the rear valley, running along the second rafter bay and wetting the ceiling plaster in the top unit tells them which contractor to call. Ask for the moisture path in words a non-technical volunteer can follow, since that is who reads it.

The rest of what makes it usable: photographs with locations attached, moisture readings tied to the spot they were taken from, the date, the inspector's name and a clear statement that they are not bidding the repair. Recommendations should be split into what stops the water and what cleans up the damage, because those two halves can land on different parties.

Send it to the trustees in writing and keep a copy. Ask that it be noted in the minutes of the meeting where it gets discussed. Minutes are the memory of a small association. A documented water problem in them is what a future buyer's attorney will find. That is also why some boards would rather it stayed a phone call.

When the board and the owner disagree

The orderly path is a written request, then board discussion, then the association's insurer. If it stalls, an attorney who does condominium work in Massachusetts is the correct next call rather than another lab test. At that stage the dispute is about documents and money, not about spores.

The independent report still does the heavy lifting, because it exists and it is dated. If the board commissions its own and the two agree, the argument ends quickly. If the board's inspector is also the company hoping to sell the remediation, you now have a reason to say out loud why that matters.

One practical note about access running the other way. The association may need to get into your unit to inspect or repair a common element. Your documents almost certainly address that. Agreeing to reasonable access early keeps the fight about the water instead of about the door.