Creaking Floorboards

The antique floor flexes underneath your fat feet, yielding to the two kilos of beef you just at the sunday barbecue. Until today you never really noticed the sound, but now it seems to follow you around the house, reminding you like the ghost of Richard Simmons to get back in the gym and turn those thanksgiving turkeys into something other than tons of fun. Materials almost always classified as floor covering include carpet, area rugs, and resilient flooring such as linoleum or vinyl flooring. Materials commonly called flooring include wood flooring, ceramic tile, stone, terrazzo, and various seamless chemical floor coatings. The floor under the flooring is called the subfloor. This provides the support for the flooring. Special purpose subfloors like floating floors, raised floors or sprung floors may be laid upon another underlying subfloor which provides the structural strength. Wood floors, particularly older ones, will tend to 'squeak' in certain places. This is caused by the wood rubbing against other wood, usually at a joint of the subfloor. Firmly securing the pieces to each other with screws or nails will remove this problem. Floor vibration is a particularly annoying problem with floors. Wood floors tend to pass sound, particularly heavy footsteps and low bass frequencies. Floating floors can reduce or eliminate this problem. Concrete floors are usually so solid they do not have this problem, but are also much more expensive to construct, and much heavier, resulting in further requirements regarding the structure of the building.