The kitchen is one of the most important rooms in a home, and the cabinets are an essential part of it. Every building inspection carried out by a home inspection engineer covers the kitchen, cabinets included.
Beyond the legal side, looks, and comfort, the engineer also checks for structural construction defects and the condition of the cabinets' internal parts and shelves, their stability, and how safe they are to use.
Defects show up at several levels. At the cosmetic level there is poor finishing and other defects covered by Israeli Standard 1271, such as peeling coating, uneven coating color, or damaged edging. Doors that do not close smoothly are another possible defect, often the result of hinges or handles installed incorrectly by the kitchen fitter, or a cabinet that is not level.
It looks like a small problem, but it shows up every time someone opens or closes that door, dozens of times a day, and it can also point to a deeper issue: material fatigue in the cabinet itself.
The most serious defect found in a cabinet inspection, though, is a safety one, where leaving it untreated can lead to anything from an unpleasant outcome to a genuinely dangerous one. A home inspection engineer checks for several of these.
One is wood swelling caused by a hidden leak, a waterproofing problem, or poor-quality materials, which is what usually makes doors or drawers close badly. Another is a shelf that has developed a sag, meaning it is partway through a sagging process that could end with it giving way; a sag like this also points to poor materials or a low-quality or defective coating.
Some manufacturers coat a shelf on both the top and the bottom; others coat only one side, which speeds up sagging. Shelf thickness relative to the load placed on it matters too.
Other common defects need no engineer to spot them, such as drawers that are hard to open and close. These usually come from poor-quality hardware, meaning the rails the drawer runs on are damaged, rusted, or badly installed, and beyond the inspection itself, they are simply an everyday annoyance. Finding this in a fairly new kitchen usually points to poor cabinet installation.
If, during an inspection, several cabinet parts turn out to have absorbed moisture and swollen in a consistent pattern, that can point to a moisture source beyond ordinary kitchen steam and smoke, possibly dampness in the wall the cabinets are mounted against. In that case, it is worth ordering a leak-detection check with a thermal camera.
All of this shows that inspecting the kitchen cabinets can turn up plenty of construction defects, including significant ones. A proper home inspection weighs all the data gathered and cross-references it to build a complete picture of the condition of the house.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company