Home inspection for interior door installation

This article was written with engineer Ron Arad.

Arad Bedek Bayit

Wooden interior doors: what a home inspection covers

Interior doors come in such a range today that it can get confusing. Design, materials and price used to be fairly standard; not anymore, the sky's the limit. Before you spend real money on interior doors, though, it helps to know how to tell one door from another and which flaws to watch for.

As part of a home inspection (bedek bayit) to identify construction defects (a building inspection), the engineer checks the interior doors too.

Interior doors

Wood interior doors are a popular way to upgrade a home's look, and contractors sometimes fit new apartments with designer doors to give them a more luxurious feel. Not every one of them is real wood, but as a rule, the more you spend on interior doors, the more upscale they look.

Even so, interior doors have their own standards, and their own defects. What could possibly go wrong with a door? Quite a bit, it turns out. Here's a short overview of the flaws to watch for during a home inspection of interior doors.

Peeling in the coating

Laminate is the cheapest, most durable coating, but it cannot be repaired once it takes an impact or a scratch: you'll need a new door. Check the coating carefully before you buy.

Veneer, a coating made of real wood bark, costs more and looks better, but it can be repaired: sand the door down and recolor it.

Faulty leveling

A building inspection should cover the interior doors too. A surprisingly common flaw is faulty leveling: the door frame (the jamb) has to be installed level, both vertically and horizontally. Get that wrong, and the door won't close properly; in the worst cases it rubs against the frame, or leaves visible gaps of light around the edges.

Inaccurate doors

Some doors come up short, under two net meters tall. Others sit an unusually large gap above the floor. Either way, it's imprecise work that a home inspection engineer's building inspection will catch.

Doors weakly anchored to the wall

A poorly anchored door isn't technically a construction defect, but it is a hazard, which is why it belongs in a home inspection. A door not properly fixed to the wall can come loose, damage the wall, and put you at risk: work you'll have to fix yourself, immediately, if it slips past you at handover.

Wrong placement

Sometimes doors and frames go in somewhere other than the plan calls for, or even against basic logic; sometimes a door is hung to open the wrong way entirely. The result is an annoying, unfixable flaw.

In one inspection on Em HaMoshavot in Petah Tikva, we found a door placed incorrectly so that it encroached into the shower stall, something that would only have surfaced after move-in, once the shower itself was installed. Only a trained eye, working through a full building inspection, catches a flaw like this.

Damaged and broken doors and faulty locks

Every door that closes, another opens, or so the saying goes. But what do you do if the interior doors in the apartment you bought turn out to be broken, or fitted with a faulty lock? More than a little frustrating.

Openings

Interior doors have standards for openings too. When a contractor falls short of them, entrances end up narrower than the Planning and Building Regulations require, which can make them impassable for wheelchairs, walkers, or strollers: a serious flaw, often impossible to fix affordably, and deeply frustrating.

Interior doors that block passage

You'd never guess what a closed door can hide. Some doors, once opened, block the passage to a room or hallway entirely, a planning failure you'd never spot on your own. A proper home inspection and building inspection will find it.

In summary, when you buy a new or resale apartment, give the interior doors real attention. Are they scratch-free? What are they made of, and coated with? Are they anchored properly? Open and close every one, make sure they latch properly, don't block anything when open, and confirm every lock works.

Most of these flaws are visible to an "ordinary" eye. Even so, it's always worth having a professional check them too, with the right equipment, as part of a full building inspection of the property you're considering.