Problems & repairs
Creaking floorboards: tracing the noise and fixing it for good
Movement, not age, is what makes a floor talk.
Creaking is friction. Either a board is rubbing against its neighbour, a board is lifting and dropping off a joist, or a nail is working in and out of its hole as you step. Age has nothing to do with it directly — a two-year-old engineered floor over a poorly prepared subfloor will creak as loudly as a Victorian pine one. The fix depends entirely on which of those three is happening, so it is worth ten minutes of diagnosis before anyone lifts a board.
Find the source before you fix anything
Have someone walk the floor slowly while you kneel nearby. Press each board by hand near the noise. If the board moves under hand pressure, the fixing has failed. If it only creaks under full weight, the joist or the batten below is likely the issue.
Nail-fixed boards on joists
Original softwood boards were nailed, and nails eventually lose their hold as the timber shrinks. Replacing the nail with a screw into the joist stops the vertical movement — but only if you hit the joist, and only if you know what services run underneath. Pipes and cables buried in joist notches are the reason this job goes wrong.
Chipboard and floating floors
Sheet subfloors creak at the joints when the tongue-and-groove edge is unsupported or the sheet is no longer bearing flat. Floating engineered and laminate floors creak when the underlay has compressed unevenly or the floor has been laid tight to a wall and has nowhere to expand into.
An expansion problem shows itself as a creak plus a slight dome in the middle of the room. That one cannot be screwed away — the perimeter gap has to be re-cut.
When relaying is the honest answer
If more than a few boards move, if the joists themselves deflect, or if a previous repair has left a patchwork of levels, spot repairs will only move the noise around. Levelling the subfloor and relaying gives you a floor that stays quiet.
Questions we're asked about this
Noisy floor you'd like quiet again?
Tell us where the noise is and what's on top — boards, chipboard, laminate or engineered — and we'll advise on the least invasive fix.
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