Storage room inspection

Taking possession of the apartment keeps everyone busy, so the storage room often gets only a passing glance.

Once you start storing things in it, though, problems sometimes surface that take real effort to fix, not to mention the damage they can do to what is stored there.

One of the most common is:

The dampness problem in the storage room

Storage rooms usually sit in underground areas such as the parking garage, which by its nature is more exposed to waterproofing failures.

Faulty exterior wall waterproofing

Dampness getting into the building is a direct violation of the Planning and Building Regulations and the Israeli Standard. The fix is either injection sealing or, in severe cases, exposing the exterior wall from the outside and re-waterproofing it.

Flooding

Sometimes dampness in the storage room traces back to flooding that occurred in the building during construction. That water drains to the lowest part of the building, the storage wing, and seeps through the joints between the floor tiles into the sand bedding layer beneath, where it can stay for a long time: water trapped under flooring typically takes one to three years to dry out naturally. Cases like this call for lifting the tiles and replacing the wet bedding layer.

Condensation (mold) in the storage room

Condensation, and the mold it causes, is one of the hardest problems to fix. Mold builds up on the walls and ceiling and eventually on whatever is stored there, though in a storage room the underlying cause is sometimes easier to solve than elsewhere.

Condensation comes from a lack of thermal insulation, a lack of ventilation, or both, and most cases in storage rooms come down to insufficient ventilation. The storage wing should have either a natural or a mechanical ventilation system: a natural system means louvered windows in the wing itself and louvered storage room doors that let fresh air into each unit, while a mechanical system means a fan that ventilates the wing several times a day.

It is worth checking that the fan is actually set to run several times a day for long enough. Where neither system is active, or neither exists, a condensation problem in winter is almost guaranteed.

The storage room door

The door needs to be functional. Both the door and its frame should be level, so the door closes properly against the frame without rubbing against the floor, and the floor itself should be level for the same reason.

The door should carry the storage room's number in a way that will not come loose, and it should have a proper, tidy finish. As noted above, it should also let fresh air in, through louvers built into the door itself or a louvered window above it.