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A balcony is a structure before it is a room

The balcony is the part of the building you use most and own least.

You assume the balcony is an outdoor room. It is a slab, a membrane, a drain and a rail: an exterior assembly. Exclusive use and common element are not the same thing, and everything that fails on a balcony fails where those two meet.

Piece 01 · Buildings · 3 min read · By

the street, eight floors down the slab above drain rail the underside the door your use their structure
01

A small roof with a floor

A balcony does two jobs at once, and they belong to different people.

It is a floor you stand on, and it is a roof over the one below. Between those two jobs sit a membrane, a slope and a drain, because water has to be sent somewhere other than into the concrete.

Everything that makes it work is on the outside of the wall. You can see all of it from the balcony itself: the surface under your feet, the seam where it lifts at the edge, the drain, and the underside of the slab above you doing the same thing for you.

02

Use and ownership are separate questions

In most Ontario condominiums the declaration makes the balcony a common element with exclusive use: words that sound contradictory until you separate them. Exclusive use means nobody else may occupy it. Common element means it is not part of what you own.

The practical difference is not who may sit there. It is who may change it, who insures it, and who pays when the membrane fails on the balcony below yours.

You own the use. The assembly belongs to the building.

03

The balcony you are standing on

Because it is outside, it takes weather from every direction, and it is the part of a building where the smallest failure has the furthest to travel: through the membrane, into the slab, and out through the ceiling of the balcony below.

That is why the drain is the thing worth knowing about in your own unit, and why a balcony is repaired from the top down rather than the bottom up.

04

What to look at, from your own balcony

Two minutes, no tools, and no need to leave the unit.

Do this on your own balcony
  1. Find the drain. Is it clear, or is it sitting under a planter or a mat?
  2. Look at the surface at the edge, where it lifts to the rail. Is the seam intact or lifting?
  3. Look at the underside of the balcony above you. Is the ceiling stained or painted over?
  4. Then read your declaration (it comes attached to a status certificate) for the words common element, exclusive use, and who maintains what.
  5. Read the two together. The assembly tells you what will need work; the declaration tells you whose work it is.

The type decides who is answerable. A condominium splits the assembly from the use, so the balcony can fail for reasons that are nobody's fault and not your repair. A semi or a detached house has the same structure with no split at all: the porch or the rear deck is one owner's problem from the membrane to the footing. A converted loft often has no balcony; its equivalent is the roof deck, where the same membrane and drain do the job for the whole building.

The type changes who pays. It does not change what water does on a flat outside surface.

05

Why we send this

Most people can describe their balcony's view and not its drain, and the drain is the part that decides whether the ceiling below is somebody's emergency this year.

So we read the building. One thing about how this city is actually put together, in enough detail that you can check it yourself and get the same answer. No figures we cannot source, no forecasts, nothing that expires in a fortnight.

How you can benefit from this: knowing which parts of a building are yours to change before anyone starts planning work on them.

· Realtor® · RARE Real Estate Brokerage · 416spaces.com

Not advice. Nothing here is a building inspection, an appraisal or a prediction, and nothing here says a balcony is defective. The diagram is schematic and describes no real building. No figure in this piece is a price.