Creaky Floorboards: Can't find company to do it, may not want to do it myself?

[mthdiy]

Hi all,

I live in my own 1930s flat in London with (I believe) pine floorboards. The floor has seen quite a bit and been treated and repaired badly in some places. Although I am fine with the 'shabby chic' of it, my baby boy really doesn't appreciate the creaky floorboards.

here's a sample picture of it:


I first considered trying to fix it myself, by taking the old screws (where present) or headless nails out and replace them with proper floorboard screws (like Tongue Tite or Spax Wirox). I am very worried though about the electric wire and pipes that run under the floor - and I don't want to clear out the rooms to be able to lift the bigger boards to have a peek (and potentially damage them..).

So I decided to hire a professional for the repair - and couldn't find one. Any London based company specialised in floor repairs and maintenance told me they are not going to do it. Reasons ranged from job too small to the uncertainty of where the problems is (e.g. the joists) and no one had any other company in mind. One company told me to ask general builder, but all builders I asked recommended to get a specialist

Does anyone have an idea how I can approach this problem?

 

[Bonni]

Correct, just when you've screwed and nailed them all down, the squeak reappears because it's a joist problem.

 

[Nightsky224]

We had a similar issue in our house and the squeak drove me mad. There was no one issue, we had a carpenter come and tackle it and it has made a massive difference however we since rang him about something else and he has said that because of our job he no longer takes on work like that!

 

[Deleted member 174758]

If you want an idea if how open ended this can be; in January I was snagging a floor in a brand new apartment -18mm T&G plywood glued and screwed to 7 x 2 joists suspended on sound isolation feet. There was a really annoying squeak near the bathroom door which was affected by anyone walking on an area maybe 8 x 5 feet outside as well as just inside the bathroom. I tried screwing down (extra screws) at first without success. I then had to cut out two sections of floor to get at the underlying issue - it was a soil pipe which ran very close to one of the joists but otherwise looked like there was sufficent clearance and where the plumber had made a cut-out on the underside of the joist to accommodate the pipe elbow. Invisible to anyone looking down from above, the clip holding the elbow and adjoining straight pipe together had a tightening screw that just touched the underside of the timber joist. Once found it took only a few minutes to fix with a recip saw, but finding it and then reinstating the floor afterwards (including replacing 1/2 sheet of ply flooring) took the best part of 1-1/2 hours. Had the laminate floor been fitted you could probably have added up to another hour to that. Bearcin mind that this is a building I was very much familiar with so I already knew where most of the potential gotchas are - starting on a building I don't know could take longer

TBH in offering such a service you'd either be asking the client to write a blank cheque, so to speak, or you'd be commiting yourself to delivering a fix within a fixed budget. I can't see either approach being viable