Wobbly and creaky floors?

We live in a 1986 “Mclean” built semi-detached home with excessive floor noise.

The upper floor has two problems. One is the ring-shack nails that have worked loose in the chipboard floor, making the floor creak, and the other is the central heating pipes that click loudly with expansion and contraction when the heating is working.

I have replaced the loose nails with screws, apart from where the partition walls are nailed though to the flooring. A small amount of movement of the chipboard near to the partition walls still produce excessive noise when stepping on them or walking by them.

I have reduced the pipe noise considerably by sliding some polythene sleeving around the hot pipes and the joists. This allows the expanding pipe to slide over the joist without producing the clicking sound. Some pipes also come into contact with the underside of the chipboard floor and the polythene sleeving is wrapped around those pipes. However, some joists are inaccessible under partition walls which still click when the heating is on.

The ground floor also produces excessive floor noise close to partition walls where the partition is nailed to the chipboard flooring, and there are some other reasons which indicate defective construction. Vibration and a rocking movement is the problem. The floor is a floating floor. That is, it is not fixed by nails, screws or glue to anything. The chipboard floor is held in place by its tongue and grooves and the surrounding skirting boards.

The noise and vibration problems got worse with the addition of a new washing machine which made the whole floor shake. We persevered for some time with fitting rubber feet and reinforcing the chipboard with three-ply under the machine, but this had very little effect.

The general rigidity of the floor is now very poor. When sitting on a chair and someone walks by it is like being on a plank balanced on top of a water bed; the floor rocks a lot. Further, we think our attached neighbour has had laminate floors fitted in place of carpet and with their young family running about we have the whole of our floor vibrating, as well as the noise.

We lifted some of the floor to investigate the flooring system used by the builders, “Mclean”. I believe it to be “HANSON”, “Jetfloor Plus”. This is a composite suspended flooring system, comprising 150mm deep pre-stressed inverted “T” beams, in-filled with expanded polystyrene blocks, finished with a floating chipboard layer.

The chipboard floor is only supported by the expanded polystyrene blocks which, in turn, are only supported by 20mm or so either side on the inverted “T” section of the pre-stressed beams. It is obvious that with continuous use during the intervening years, and impact damage inflicted when moving heavy domestic equipment about, these bearing points have compressed.

We also found that the threshold area by the rear entrance is not substantially supported underneath the floorboards. We found a thin expanded polystyrene slab covering a broken concrete building block. As far as we can see, the broken building block is supported by an in-fill of rubble.

We believe we are now living with substandard flooring, even by 1986 standards.

We have contacted an architect for advice on possible remedial work that can be undertaken.

It would seem that the pre-stressed inverted “T” beams could also support solid concrete building blocks with thinner expanded polystyrene slabs covering them, and finishing with the same floating chipboard layer.

This is the now well known and used “block and beam” suspended flooring system. This would, in our opinion, provide some 60% to 80% more rigidity to our floor than we currently have.

The big question we face is why we should have to pay to correct this substandard flooring.