The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

First Aid For The Ailing Houses

Narrow wedges driven between the subflooring and the beams at these places will close the gap and silence the floor squeak. If the beams are covered by a ceiling, the subfloor can be reached for renailing only by taking up the finish floor. The alternative is to drive new nails down through the finish floor —and the subfloor—into the beams.

Sometimes beams are too long for properly supporting the floor. Adjustable metal posts, with a jacking mechanism, are available for providing this needed support. Placed in position under a sagging beam, one of these jacks is gradually adjusted to force the beam upward to make the floor level. only a slight adjustment is made at a time; if it were done all it once, the change could cause plaster walls to crack. With gradual adjustments, spread over a length of time, there's a good chance the plaster will stay put.

A refinement in this adjustable metal post is quite a moneysaver. This consists only of the screw-jack part, which is only a few inches high. The home owner gets a four-by-four wood post (or a 3-inch pipe) cut to 3 inches shy of the actual distance between floor and beam. The small, sturdy screw-jack is simply placed on top of the post or pipe, and then adjusted to fill the remaining distance. The home owner pays only for the post (or pipe) and the small jack; this naturally saves considerably over having to buy a device 8 or 10 feet in height.

If the joists are exposed from the basement or crawl space, it is simple to measure from the outside wall to the center of the first joist and then repeat the measurement on the floor above to locate its position. Measure the distance from the center of the first to second joists and that should be the spacing repeated across the floor.

Because of the many variations in house construction, no one rule for locating floor beams from the top will cover all cases. The following method covers many constructions:

Strip flooring can be considered as running at a right angle to the beams.

There is always a beam along an outside wall below the level of the floor. Measuring from the face of an outside-wall baseboard along a strip of flooring for 16 inches should locate the first beam; other beams across the room will be at intervals of 16 inches.