A false economy

We have laid the reclaimed beech flooring on the first floor. The timber strips were secured using Junckers 129.1 clips creating a suspended floor.

As we are not building a sports hall we decided it wasn't necessary to use Junckers Profoam 10mm underlay at £404.25 ex VAT for a 75 sq m roll and bought Provent 2.3mm underlay instead.

Having laid the first few rows of planks we discovered that we had a big problem. The boards squeaked VERY, VERY BADLY. They squeaked on EVERY STEP. It would be impossible to live with it. We spent several hours searching for a solution on the internet. The problem of squeaking wooden floors is regularly raised on various forums and the answers given are almost always that the sub-floor is not smooth or within the allowed tollerance no matter how much the person with the problem insists that it is. I feel their pain as we have a perfectly smooth plywood sub-floor - and squeaky boards.

Watching Mark walking up and down on the floor I could see the timber flexing with every step and hypothesised that the problem could be that the floor was not sufficiently supported. We folded a strip of underlay to create a pad 4 times thicker than the Provent and slipped it under a section of the flooring. It made a dramatic difference to the squeaking. As a result of this test we bit the bullet and ordered a roll of the Profoam (sufficient for the first floor). Laid on the Profoam the amount of squeaking has been significantly reduced. It seems that a suspended floor isn't suspended in the normal sense of the word after all but rather is lifted above the sub-floor by the underlay.

(Incidentally the other reason sometimes given for the squeaking is that there are gaps between the planks caused by a decrease in humidity. This also is not true in our case.)

Over the Easter break we will be sanding the boards. Because of the curvature of the roof it will be impossible to get even a small hand sander close to the edge of the floor and so I sanded the outer planks before they were laid.

#strawbalewoodlands #strawbalehouse #junckersflooring #squeakingwoodenfloor #JunckersProfoamunderlay #underlay