Step on floor, wall sqeaks. WTF?

[FlavorFlav]

Andy Hill wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Perhaps a body is buried in the wall and is squeaking for attention.

[Andy Hill]

Anybody ever run into something like this?

I've got a chunk of floor in my house where if I step on the floor, a certain section of my wall (seemingly about 4' off the floor) squeaks. Floor doesn't squeak, just the wall. Only thing I can think of is that the floor is moving and somehow rubbing against the wall studs. Don't know how that can be, 'tho

-- the wall plate should be on top of the subfloor, and lots of wall studs are connected to the plate, so why would only one particular wall stud be squeaking?

I suppose I could just pull back the carpet, sink a few dozen deck screws into the floor joist, and see if the problem goes away, but that just strikes me as shotgunning the problem.

Any other ideas before I shotgun the problem?

[Matt]

When they built your house, a mouse was trapped in the wall and it's tail was nailed to the floor by the carpet guys.

[Alan]

Termites.

[Andy Hill]

Naw. We always bury the bodies down in the crawlspace. More convenient to the lime pit.

[Andy Hill]

Squeak's been going on for quite a while. Damn mouse must be the size of small dog by now. Maybe I'll load up the nailer with some framing nails. Silver plated, perhaps.

[Norminn]

Subfloor you stand on moves on the nails holding the plate, or pushes the plate up and down a bit?

What's underneath the floor?

[Andy Hill]

Well, to follow up, I went and sunk a few deck screws into the floor joists to see if they would help at all. Nope. If anything, it made it worse. Hmmmm....

Working off of Norminn's hint, I then assumed that the subfloor was somehow moving relative to the wall plate, and the squeak was from a loose nail rubbing. So I went down in the crawlspace to rap with the black widows for a bit, and while there sunk a couple of deck screws up through the subfloor into the wall plate. And wattayaknow...problem solved, at least for now.

Thanks, all!