BCA ceiling heights for habitable rooms

Hi,
We recently bought a 35-40 year old house in North Rocks. We get the keys at the end of October. The layout of the house is currently as follows:

Bottom floor:
Garage, Rumpus room, study and massive store room

Top floor: Three bedrooms, bathroom, laundry, kitchen and lounge room

Prior to settlement we were measuring the rooms downstairs and if I recall correctly the floor to ceiling height was somewhere around 2360-2380mm. These measurements were in the rumpus and the study. From what I've read on this forum and trying to look at the BCA specifications, a habitable room is supposed to have a floor to ceiling height of 2400mm. The ceiling downstairs at the moment is wood panelling, the floor of the top floor is floorboards which are being supported by joists to which the wood panelled ceiling downstairs is attached to.

Does anybody have any ideas what can be done to rectify the missing 40mm or so? What if the wood panelled ceiling was removed and we had the floorboards from the top floor as the ceiling, obviously that would give more than 2400mm clearance to the bottom of the floorboards, but it would be very close to 2400mm to the bottom of the joists. Does the 2/3 rule apply in this scenario or is that only in attics?


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