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.- posted
17 years ago