Do This Before Installing a New Floor | Subfloor Series Part 1 of 5

amazing how just a little bit of movement causes such an irritating sound in today's video we're going to show you how to get rid of your floor squeaks once and for all and how they started in the first place all right so first thing you do when you see a squeak everyone likes to find oh there's that nail that needs to be embedded there problem solved right now watch what happens as soon as you get up oh how come the nail doesn't stay down i'm going to help you understand your floors how your house is built so you know what to do to stop this from reoccurring over and over and over again because if you want to install a new floor and you can't stop your squeaks you got no business moving forward let's get this started okay guys so when we're talking about squeaky floors generally what we're doing is we're talking about flooring um i'm gonna say pre-1990 and i think 1990 is around the time period i don't quote me on the exact date it wasn't like june 3rd or something but in the 90s we started to change the technique for installing subfloor on our floor joists now there were let's say from um the mid to late 1800s up until about 1990 very similar floor joist packages in the world and it was kind of a standard we used to use a two by ten okay and the in the older stuff it was it wasn't um it wasn't planed down to be exactly nine and a quarter by uh one and a half okay it was actually two inch by ten inch it was rough sawn lumber and they used to use that as a floor joist and then they would have plank flooring usually like a three quarter or one inch solid pine depending on the region right they'd use the wood in the region and they would tongue and groove and put that in and they would always nail it together and generally speaking old growth forest which is what they were using back in the old days it stayed really strong and really straight okay there's not a lot of problems with old growth trees as a rule uh there's always going to be a certain percentage of well that knot was just on the wrong space for what that floor was trying to carry and you know so situations will happen but as a rule we'll call old growth was a lot stronger and a lot straighter okay the more you go through time in through the 30s 40s 50s 60s especially the 40s 50s and 60s if your house was built then they were experimenting like mad so the standard today is 2 by 10 with a 5 8 osb subfloor back in the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s they were still experimenting with half inch subfloor trying to get away with it they were widening out the floor joist cavities going to 40 oh sorry 40 inch man that'd be interesting they were going to 24 and 30 32s i mean it was crazy what they were trying to get away with but they were constantly experimenting and then the building codes started to get a little more serious about how we did things okay nowadays we've got this going on now back in the old days they used to nail everything together so you'd have this nailing situation where they just caught the edge of the board you know things are imperfect and then they started using pneumatic nailers the automatic and because it was automatic they were moving so fast i mean i've been in floor in basements before looked up at the ceiling and seen nothing but missed nails i mean it was really brutal the faster you go the less attention to details so the more risky you are of having issues like that when it just misses it's not catching and if it's not nailed properly it's not helping to transfer load when you walk okay now somewhere along the way in technology we move from nails to screws and that is much better and that's actually pretty recent up until recent days everybody was running around with a pneumatic air nailer just pounding nails all over the place and here's what happens when you step in the middle of the wood okay you get what's called deflection and that means the weight is going down and then here where it hits that piece of wood is being pushed up okay so i'm going to just step on this right now and i'm going to let you take a look at the difference no weight okay you see the movement in the floor i'm not jumping up and down i'm no grand piano but you hear the squeak [Music] that squeak is actually caused by the sound of the wood right rubbing up and down on the nails okay it doesn't matter how many times you pound that in over time as you're walking deflection will lift that out really easily okay so for everybody in the renovation market who's looking at new flooring the first thing you've got to do before you think about new flooring is fixing your subfloor if you have an older house now if you have dimensional lumber see this you're going to get weird shapes you're going to get bows and you're going to get curves you're going to get all kinds of action and what happens is that you'll put in your joists nice and straight and then over time it goes bowed now every one of those nails is still set at the same depth and the plywood is moving underneath your feet when you're walking that's where the noise is coming from so before you move forward and put in a new floating floor where you change your add hardwood you've got to deal with the subfloor issue so in this video i'm going to teach you guys how to get rid of the creeks and it's this simple now where i live in canada we have something called a floor screw and i've heard in the comments before that you don't have that down in the states i don't know i haven't been to the hardware store to confirm that but if anybody knows for sure could you put in the comments section maybe you just have a different name or there's a um a brand out there that's cornered the market that i'm not aware of anyway flooring screws are really awesome you just come along here and you drive that in now here's the difference it doesn't change the deflection but what it does is it gets rid of the ability for the subfloor to disengage from your dimensional lumber and if it holds everything tight then you're not going to get the rubbing on the screw on the nails you're going to get rid of your squeaks so if you've got squeaks and you're not going to open up your floor and rebuild the whole package okay i'm just talking about if you're going to be changing your flooring and you've got squeaks buy a box of flooring screws okay and go and add a screw everywhere that there's a nail now along the floor joist package subfloor has to have as a nail every eight inches you can change that with a screw every eight inches you just set it beside it you know which way the floor joist is running because the nails every eight in the opposite direction they're every 16 okay and that's all you need to know so you can just put a fastener next to the old fasteners drive those nails down or pull them out for all that matters because they're useless and you will eliminate all the squeaks in your floors as well oh give this video a thumbs up if that is going to save your bacon don't forget to subscribe to this channel because we didn't do this mock-up just to show you about a squeaky floor i'm going to be cutting out the subfloor and showing you how to open it up drill holes run plumbing repair your subfloor close it back up again and bring up your subfloor standard to such an incredible level that you can install new building materials on old floors listen this is really key okay older houses with dimensional lumber are not designed to have modern materials installed in them think about this for a second old materials were skinny heck even the even though hardwood was only two and a quarter inches wide so it could follow all the curves and all the imperfections okay the more modern the material the wider the plank hardwood engineer hardwood now is 12 16 inches wide okay tiles are getting massive all of this is because we've gone from dimensional lumber to engineered truss engineered truss stay perfectly flat they don't need help leveling okay and as a result people with more modern construction homes are allowed to brag about it in the design choices they make with bigger flooring now if you've got an older house and you want to move to bigger flooring you can but you're going to have to watch the next few videos because i'm going to show you how to open up your subfloor and level everything off and double up the strength so that you can put in brand new massive tiles or huge engineered hardwood and not run into problems and have a gorgeous home listen if you're interested in learning about subfloor then you probably have a flooring job planned in your house one of the most common flooring projects around right now is floating floors whether it's vinyl or engineered hardwood or laminate it doesn't really matter you still have the same problem get rid of the squeaks so if you're going to install those kinds of floorings i want you to click the link up here because we've got videos that'll show you how to install those and get it perfect every time okay you're your best contractor have a successful renovation we'll see you soon

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 353,912

Rating: 4.9509501 out of 5

Keywords: installing a new floor, floor noise, squeaky floor how to fix, squeaky floorboard, affordable, cost effective, affordable squeaky floor fix, creaky floor, why does my floor squeak, why does my floor make noise, floor noise how to fix, cost effective floor noise fix, easy floor noise fix, what to do about floor noise, what to do before installing new floor, How do i prepare to install flooring, squeaky floor under hardwood, sub floor construction, decking, sub floor

Id: mi9BpuXEEho

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021