Subfloor Sanity

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Last month I got an email from a desperate woman who, in her own words, was “about to die from lack of sleep”. The problem wasn’t her nerves or her love life gone awry or any dire financial setback. The problem was the carpenters who built her house. According to the urgent plea for help, the ceiling above this woman’s flat sounds like a creaky wooden sailing vessel in a hurricane whenever her nocturnal neighbour moves around upstairs. “Is there a cost-effective way to solve this problem quickly?” the woman hoped.

The fact is, floor noise is one of those things that’s easy to prevent while a building is going up, but much harder to fix properly after the fact. And as building techniques advance, the excuses for poor floor performance become slimmer and slimmer. Noisy floors never need to happen any more.

Floor creaks were once an almost unavoidable part of living in a house built with traditional materials. When smooth-shanked nails were all carpenters had available to join solid wood subfloors to wooden joists, underfoot noise was inevitable. But as modern building methods developed around more stable, engineered wood products and fasteners it eliminated any excuses for anything but an absolutely silent, solid floor. That’s what you can expect with any new home or renovation, though reaching that goal in the real world still takes know-how.

All noisy floors are caused by the same thing: wood movement. This is especially true where the subfloor and floor joists meet, though it can also occur between strips of a solid wood floor. That’s why building a rock-solid floor begins with three things: choosing correct floor joists; laying down a beefy subfloor using the best construction adhesive; and securing the glued subfloor with screws driven every 8 inches before the glue hardens.

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