What is wrong with my floor joists? Our house is built on a crawl space and the area that creaks is in the master bedroom and master bath. The floors are in good shape, the house is ten years old (we recently purchased it). The home inpsection found no defects. The creaks and pops are annoying to my wife and since i get up at 4:30 in the morning she gets awoken from the creaking noises. What can I do to figure out how to fix it?
What kind of floor do you have? If it's hardwood, one possibility is to go into the crawl space, remove the insulation, and drive screws up through the subfloor into the finished floor. You'll need about a thousand of them.
If you have carpet directly on the subfloor, I've heard of people nailing through the carpet in the squeaky spots.
It could also be your subfloor, if it was not glued to the joists when it was installed. To try to fix that, you might go into the crawl space, have someone walk on the squeaky spots so you can see the movement, and try to screw the subfloor down to the joists in a way similar to toe-nailing.
Architect (NY) and Home Designer (PA)
Posts: 2566 | Location: Tobyhanna, PA | Registered: 24 October 2005
Hi, the problem is that the nails used to install the floor have moved, ever so slightly. The sound you hear is actually from the plywood moving against the nail. Depending on the size of the room i would probably just empty the room, roll up the carpet ( if thats what you have) and hammer down the nails. Follow this up with some of the super strong deck screws they have out there about 12 inches on center and bury them so that they are at least flush with the floor on every joist.
Prior to screwing down a joist you may want to inject liquid nails or something similar to any gaps which can me seen from below in the crawl space. Glue then screw... repeat.
