New floors and stairs

ronbyrne2005

Our house is around 20 years old and the floors upstairs were always quite flimsy and creaky and allowed lot of noise through. Around 6 years ago many of the floors upstirs were taken up temporarily to put in gas pipes. Now some of floors upstirs are starting to give way. So i was wondering how much to get around 600sq feet upstirs in a house relaid with new good quality floors and also to put in a new stairs as old one is very creaky etc.

Poor Uncle Tom

Can you please explain what you mean by 'give way' as this sounds alarming.

Creaking in timber first floors can come from a number of causes and usually not just one cause on its own. If the joists are adequately sized and the moisture content of the timber is correct then proper bracing and screwed WBP deck will usually work to prevent creaking, hard to do as a retro fit without disrupting all the floors.

ronbyrne2005

Poor Uncle Tom wrote: »

Can you please explain what you mean by 'give way' as this sounds alarming.

Creaking in timber first floors can come from a number of causes and usually not just one cause on its own. If the joists are adequately sized and the moisture content of the timber is correct then proper bracing and screwed WBP deck will usually work to prevent creaking, hard to do as a retro fit without disrupting all the floors.

by give way i mean timberboard stuff is breaking at point where its nailed to the joice(Spelling?). It's only a small area near top of stairs where theres lots of wear and tear.It's not a serious issue and worst that could happen is a foot could go through top floor level but not through ceiling below.
Basically since we have lived in house someone walking upstairs sounds like thunder downstairs. Need some sound insulation between floors too maybe?

Poor Uncle Tom

Ok, the full job would be as follows:

Remove skirtings, saddles and floorboards from each room, one at a time,
Insert the required bracing and quilt insulate the floor while you are at it,
Screw fix 19mm WBP to the joists,
Provide sound insulation layer,
Provide new floor boards,
Remove 25mm from the bottoms of all doors,
Replace door saddles and skirtings.

This will be time consuming to carry out throughout, but very worthwhile. There will be an extra height of about 25mm but if you are changing the stairs anyway this will not matter.

cork1

what i have found is that over time with 19mm WBP is that if there is expansion or movement in the floor it cause creaking. the old method to solve this is use a washer or two to space out the sheets at the joints and keep a good expansion gap the top of the stairs. the best thing ive seen recently is osb flooring. tongue and grooved 8x4 sheets of flooring glued together and screwed down make a very solid floor or in your case subfloor.

Poor Uncle Tom

A lot of the creaking is caused by slight movement in the fixing nails, by using screws to secure the WBP or OSB and because of the deck effect the sheeting gives to the floor the creaking should be removed. Once the floors are initially dried out there shouldn't be much movement in the sheeting and all of them I've seen have been fitted tight, with no ill effects.