If you've got squeaky floors under your carpet
or under hardwood, linoleum, or laminate like this,
I'll show you how to take care of any of those squeaks.
Whether you have access to the joist underneath,
or even if you can only take care of them from above,
the best place to start is always underneath. If you have access to it,
whether that's a crawl space or perhaps an unfinished basement,
if you can get down there,
that's where you'll be able to solve the problem the best and avoid any issues.
Have a helper stand up top and jump up and down or make whatever noises they
need to to get that squeak. So you can see exactly where it is.
The issue of the squeak is usually because you have a little bit of a gap
between the joist and the floor that sits on top of it.
There's a deflection that happens,
basically that subfloor is moving up and down, causing some friction.
And that squeak is usually caused by the subfloor rubbing against the nails that
aren't properly seated in. So to fix that, you can take a wood shim like this,
put a little bit of glue on the end of it, and then slide that into the gap.
You wanna be careful not to push this too far.
You're not trying to expand the gap,
just to fill it once that's in use a blade to score it and then snap it off,
be sure to check along the length of a joist to see if there are other places
that need it as you may need to use multiple shims to take care of the problem.
Another super easy and quick option is to use a piece of one by two,
like this cut to a small length, maybe six to eight inches.
And then you can use that as a brace to support the subfloor.
Start by pre-drilling the one by two with a couple of holes.
And you'll notice that I'm drilling these at an angle so that I have room to
actually drive the screws in without hitting the joist next to it.
Next place some wood glue on the back and the top of the brace.
Place the brace tight up against that subfloor, drive your two screws,
and once you've got that in place,
the subfloor has nowhere to go because it's gonna sit right on top of that
brace, which is secured to the joist. Now,
if you don't have access to your floors from underneath where you can see the
joists and everything, you still have the option to fix everything,
especially under carpet here, for example, from up above. Now,
this might be kind of intimidating to people because we're gonna be removing the
carpet and then putting it back. And it's not a big deal.
I promise you can do this.
And there's actually just a couple things you need to do this,
and it won't cost you much at all.
So the proper way to do this is to access the subfloor underneath so we can see
where it connects to the joists underneath that.
So we're gonna start by removing the carpet and a couple of sets of pliers make
that a lot easier.
So you can start in the corner and then just pinch the carpet and then pull it
up. And it will start to release from the tack strips all the way around.
Now that we've got the carpet out of the way we can pull up our padding and
sometimes this is glued or stapled to the floor and ours is stapled.
So you wanna try to preserve the staples to where you're not leaving any holes.
And usually there's not a ton of them.
They're usually around the perimeter like this. There we go.
And once you get going, it starts to come up okay.
So now we have our whole floor here,
including this carpet blade knife that was left behind for us.
Excellent bonus. So the screws we're using are inch and a half,
and these are GRK R4's. These are great. You can find 'em at the hardware store.
I'll put some links in the description to these as well.
So this is the kind of thing we're looking for. First of all,
we've got a joint here and this should be sitting on top of a joist where these
two butt together, but also look,
you've got all these little holes where you can see that the hammers were trying
to toenail those things into the joist.
Those are pretty far spread out more than they ought to be,
but then you can see over here, it continues with this line.
And so that's where, that's where the nails were put in,
ideally every eight inches is how often they should be in there.
And then these joists are typically gonna be placed every 16 inches.
So I've got one there. I've got another one right here at 16.
I've got another one here at 16, going right here.
I can see a hammer holes here and here and all the way down.
Typically you can rely on a 16 inch grouping for each of your joists.
Now, because I can see where that joist, I'm just gonna drive these in.
And I'm gonna try to put these about every eight inches.
So I'm just gonna keep placing these. Now, if you've got a joint like this,
you want toenail it in to the joist underneath.
So you're gonna put a little bit of an angle on it like that. And again,
you can always feel if it's grabbing on, it'll,
it'll just spin freely if you're, if you don't get it. You
hear that? There's nothing there.
So that really pulled down to where that squeak was before.
So now that I've got this joist done,
I'm gonna do the same thing on all of these other joists here.
And while you've got your carpet pulled up,
just get any area where there's traffic,
if your foot is gonna be stepping on it,
just take care of it while you've got everything prepped here,
Next up, we need to remove all of the staples that were there before,
and then you can choose from there. If you want to put staples back in,
I've got a handy little staple gun here that I can use to do that.
Sometimes people will actually glue the padding in,
but I don't recommend that you just want to get it back to a fully functional
state like it was before.
Now,
this worked out really well for us to not use any special tools or anything like
that. But I did purchase one of these just in case,
this is a knee kick for carpet laying.
And this thing is actually pretty inexpensive.
You can get these at Harbor freight for about 24 bucks when they're not on sale.
And if you get one of their 20% off sales, even better,
and you can pick these up on Amazon for maybe 50 to 60 bucks on up,
but they're pretty easy to use. Just grab it onto the base there in front,
and then connect your knee with the center of the pad here. And
that'll help push that carpet right up against the wall and you can hook it on
the tack strip.
Now, if you've got laminate or hardwood or linoleum,
there are a few steps you can take,
even if you don't have access to it from underneath. So in this case,
we've got pretty bad deflection right here. It's able to sink down.
So sometimes it's actually the two boards that are rubbing against each other in
cases like this, and that could be tongue and groove or an interlocking system.
And sometimes they just need to be lubricated at the joint.
So we're gonna start with that. That's by far the easiest thing to try to treat,
and we'll see if that takes care of it. If not,
we've got a couple of other options. So.
To do this, we're just gonna use this bike lube. And this is wax based.
That's kind of important.
And the wax based stuff works really well and you can apply it dry and then it
dries up and solidifies within a short period of time.
You can see the wax at the bottom here. So we're just gonna shake that up
And then we're gonna apply it right where we have this squeaky part here. So
that's kind of the worst part right here.
So I'm gonna put some right in the joints here.
I'm let that kind of seep in, put some on this side as well.
Now, once that's applied,
you can step on it and try to get that to seep in.
And based on what I'm hearing, this is not the issue.
So I'm gonna have to move to another level here. When you want to get that off,
you can just wipe it off with the rag.
Now, if you try a stud finder on this,
you're really not gonna be able to find much typically even on a deep scan mode,
but what you can use are your registers. If you have those on the floor.
So on this one,
we lift up the register and sometimes you can actually just see right there
where the joist is in this case, everything's pretty well covered up.
So I can't quite see.
So I'm gonna use a pry bar and just gently loosen up a couple of these
nails that are here. There's one right there.
I'm not sure if this will show up on camera at all or not,
but I can see the joist over on the left side there. And then right down there,
you can kinda just barely see it back there,
but it's just right pretty much up against where this register is.
So it looked like one was right about here.
And the other one was a little further away, maybe over here,
and we can use our tape measure to verify that.
So if we've got one there and the other one just over there, that makes sense.
So that gives us our 16 inches.
And so you can actually just use the grooves in the floor to help you line that
up with where the crack is and where the squeaking is.
So now that we've identified our two joists, these are 16 inches on center,
just like they ought to be. So we know we're in the right place.
We're gonna use the squeak no more kit.
And I've used this on several projects in the past,
and these screws have a little special snap off point.
And then you use that in conjunction with this fixture.
We've got a hardwood fixture, a soft wood fixture,
and then we're gonna use the soft wood on this one,
and we're gonna drive a screw right down in there.
And we've got a special bit that comes with it that, uh,
it's got a collar that will stop it at just the right place so that it can snap
off just below the surface.
Do you see it lifted up right there. There we go.
And then it pulls it right back down. Now it leaves a screw like that.
And then it's got this little break off fixture here that we can slide in there
and then you just rock it to the side and off it goes, okay.
So that's gone. And now we're gonna do the same thing over on this side.
And we might have to do a few of these to take care of this. And then,
oh, wow. That is already way, way less than it was.
So I'm gonna do a couple more around here on those joists and we'll see if we
can get that totally eliminated.
Okay. Now that we've got six of them in there, Look at that. No more squeak.
I've purchased some laminate floor putty here,
which I'm gonna go with this darker one and see how that looks. There we go.
Okay. Gonna fill that in.
So now we're just gonna get that excess off there.
Here we go. I'll bet you can't even see where those are anymore.
So that kind of takes care of that, but best of all, even stepping on it,
No squeaks. Now, lastly, if you have a squeak underneath your tile,
there's one simple solution to this.