Kitchen Water Damage & Mold

A dishwasher that had been leaking quietly under the cabinet run for months, taking out the toe kicks and subfloor.

About the project

The homeowners noticed the toe kick under their kitchen sink cabinet had gone soft. Pulling it away revealed that the cabinet base, the subfloor beneath it and the wall behind had been wet for a long time.

The culprit was the dishwasher — a pinhole in the supply connection releasing a small amount of water on every cycle, running under the cabinet run rather than out into the room where anyone would see it.

The challenge

Slow leaks are more destructive than fast ones, because nobody responds to them. This one had probably been going for eight months to a year. Three base cabinets sat on a subfloor that had lost structural integrity, and growth had travelled up inside the wall behind the sink to about thirty inches.

The complication was that the kitchen had been renovated four years earlier and the cabinets were a discontinued line.

The result

We removed the three affected base cabinets carefully — two were salvageable once the bases were rebuilt — cut out and replaced roughly twenty square feet of subfloor, removed drywall to thirty-six inches behind the run, and remediated and dried the wall cavity.

The dishwasher supply was replaced with a braided line and a proper shutoff. Cabinets went back on new bases, matched flooring was pieced in, and the homeowners kept their kitchen.

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