You bought a new apartment from a contractor, everything looks fresh and nice, and you are ready for a break from chasing after contractors and professionals. Fair enough.
What you may not realize is that a new home comes with a legal warranty period from the contractor: for four years, you can require the building to meet its technical specification. In other words, defects an expert building inspection engineer finds are not your problem. They are the contractor's responsibility, and the repair is on his dime.
That is why it pays, before problems appear, to check whether the contractor really met every commitment, including using standard materials and meeting the relevant codes.
Construction defects are not limited to dampness, wall cracks and cladding. Some problems only surface after years, or after a rainy season. Consider the stairwell: what happens once heavy use wears the stairs down?
Did the contractor use quality materials, or will no amount of polishing make them presentable after just a few years? Are they safe? Will your kids, who will use them until they are old enough to take the elevator on their own, avoid tripping over uneven spacing?
This article looks at some of the legal requirements for stairs in multi-story buildings. We cannot cover every angle here, but we want to flag an area residents often overlook.
We are talking about stairs used as an exit from the apartment or the building.
Start with the defect at the root of stair safety: is the rise, the height of each step, the same as the next one? A difference smaller than 5 mm usually will not bother anyone, so it does not count as a defect. Even a gap larger than that but still under 1 cm is not a defect, as long as the steps in question are not consecutive.
Anything beyond that, though, is a real hazard. Your brain, constantly signaling instructions to your muscles, sets the height and force of each step to match the rise it expects. A sudden change in rise disrupts that rhythm and can throw you off balance, causing a fall.
This defect is easy to check with nothing more than a ruler or tape measure, but just as hard to fix once it exists, and it typically brings the property's value down.
Next comes a defect only a certified lab can verify: wear. Stairs that wear down quickly become genuinely dangerous to climb or descend, and the wear rate depends, naturally, on the material the stairs are made of. The law requires stairs in shared buildings to meet "medium resistance," capped at 2.2 mm of wear (compare that to the 2.6 mm allowed inside apartments).
Contractors are legally required to use only approved materials for stair cladding; Hebron stone, for instance, is banned for this use. Fixing this defect means replacing the stair cladding.
Another easily identified defect concerns how many steps make up a flight. A flight must have between 3 and 16 steps. This applies to real flights connecting one floor to another, not one or two steps linking adjacent levels within the same space.
The logic is straightforward: a flight shorter than three steps is easy to miss and can tire you out unnecessarily, while a longer flight with no landing to rest on is just as much a hazard.
In short, stairs in multi-story buildings deserve real attention. A home inspection engineer can save you significant money by identifying defects in the building and letting you demand they be fixed, free of charge, during the warranty period.
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