Sell the house and get a house with a slab and you won't hear any
creaks.

Or face the facts. All housing is temporary and 2 story houses are
more temporary than one story houses. Nothing lasts forever and your
house is aging and settling normally. All houses age and settle.
Face the facts.

If it bothers you, then hire a contractor and ask for a 10 year
warranty that he will keep your house creak free. Pay him well and he
will come out every year or two and remove your flooring and tighten
all the screws and you will be happy.







On 7 Feb 2007 03:52:45 -0800, wrote:

I hope someone can help me with this problem. We bought this townhouse
two years ago. When we first saw the house it was empty. We had the
home inspection and nothing really was wrong with the house. Then the
day we moved in, after the movers were gone, we found that the second
floor was very, very creaky. It was really, really bad. The worst part
was the master bedroom. We called a few people to look at it and a
carpet company came over and they lifted all the carpeting and screwed
down the floors. It was great. There was one problem area, about a
three foot area next to the wall adjacent to the master bathroom (the
master bath has creaks too, but that wasn't screwed down because of
the tile). The guy put shims between the floor and the wall and it was
fine. We had no squeaks or creaks at all. That was done in May 2005.
By December 2005 the creaks were back, but just in that one area by
the wall. But this time it sounded different, like the joists were
making the noise. These were louder cracking sounds. We called
contractors about this and one guy came out and noticed that the floor
in that area dipped down a bit. He removed part of the subfloor to
check the joists and thought they were okay, except that one of them
was a bit lower than the other. He put a different piece of wood back
and suggested that we get all new subflooring and hardwood floors
installed. We weren't too sure about that and decided to get in touch
with the builder and the warranty company (the house has a ten year
structural warranty, and we were in the 7th year). They came to check
it out and said that there was no structural problems. That was in May
2006. A neighbor was there that day and he pulled the carpet back
again and screwed down the floors a second time. Again, no more noise.
Now, Dec. 2006, the noise slowly comes back and today it seems that
the subfloor is not creaking, but it is the joists that are making
this loud cracking sound. The sound also appears in the bathroom and
runs along about three or four joists and it sounds like the wall
makes a noise too. This is driving me crazy. It
is also worse than before. I don't know what to do anymore. I thought
it might be because there is one piece of subflooring that is
different than the rest of the floor or that the bathroom subflooring
is the culprit. I hope someone can point me in the right direction
about how we should proceed with this. Thanks in advance.