Floor Repair

When you consider the punishment caused by everyday foot traffic, it's quite surprising that floors and stairs last as well as they do. Eventually, though, wear and tear do take their toll. Squeaks develop, minor damage afflicts resilient tile and sheet flooring, or the entire surface begins to show its age and needs floor repair. Fortunately, floor repair is much simpler than you might have thought. Let's begin with how to get squeaks out of your floors because squeaky floors aren't serious structural problems, but they can be annoying.

If you have exposed hardwood floors, you may be able to perform minor floor repair and stop the squeak by sprinkling talcum powder over the noisy boards and sweeping it back and forth to force it down into the cracks. If there's a basement or crawl space under the noisy floor, work from this area to perform floor repair. Watch the subfloor under the noisy floorboards while a helper steps on the floor above. If the subfloor moves visibly or if you can pinpoint the noise first outline the affected areas. Then at the joists closest to your outlines, look for gaps between the joist and the subfloor as wherever there's a gap, the floorboards move. To perform floor repair here, install shingles or wood shims into the gaps to reduce movement.

If there are no gaps along the joists, or if the squeaks are coming from an area between joists, there's probably a gap somewhere between the floorboards and the subfloor. To pull the two layers together, perform floor repair by installing wood screws up through the subflooring in the squeaky areas. The wood screws should be long enough to penetrate into the floor above you but not so long that they go all the way through the boards and stick up through your floor.

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