Spring is here, but at my house, winter has left its mark on just about everything. Out back, the old patio deck has been warped by rain, sun, freezes and thaws, its boards no longer laying flat but rattling underfoot. Indoors, things are worse. The floorboards have been groaning since December, desiccated by furnace-heated air until they shrank, came loose and began rubbing against one another.
If either of these problems sounds familiar, this month’s D.I.Y. column is for you. We’ll cover a few simple ways to deal with loud, loose floorboards. We’ll also learn a bit about that humble hero of home repairs — the nail — and how to choose the right one for whatever job you’re working on.
If you have creaky floors, you and your neighbors will enjoy some welcome quiet. If you have a deck, you’ll end up with a more comfortable place to hang out as the weather warms up.
Happily, the tools and materials for these projects are cheap. The work goes quickly, and the results will be almost invisible (except for decking fasteners, which aren’t meant to be invisible anyway). Perhaps best of all, the project will make you more confident with your hammering, a skill that transfers to any number of home-improvement tasks.
If there’s a larger D.I.Y. lesson here, it’s one I’ve taken from my own past fiascos: Don’t overcommit at the start. There are usually multiple ways to approach a project, but some are all-or-nothing — meaning there’s no changing course once you’ve begun. Instead, I like to start with a step that’s easy to reverse, or at least to conceal, and that doesn’t render alternate approaches difficult or impossible.
Nailing a loose floorboard into the joist below should eliminate the rattle or squeak. But if it doesn’t work, it’s easy to undo or hide, and still leaves the other, more involved methods on the table. (We’ll touch on some of them later.) Very often it does work, though, making the simple nail not just the low-commitment method, but the right one.
Let’s gather the tools.
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A standard 16-ounce hammer is light in the hand but heavy enough for almost any job. Look for one with a curved (not straight) claw and a smooth, not milled (or toothy) face. They’re better at pulling out bent nails and leave lighter scars if you accidentally strike the wood surface.
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For most floorboards, two-inch or 2.5-inch hardened trim nails are perfect. I’ve been using W.H. Maze’s two-inch nails for the past year on my floors, and I recommend them over the similar nails you’ll find in chain stores. They’re far stronger and less prone to bending.
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To sink the heads of the nails below the surface of the floorboards so they’re invisible, you’ll be using a hand tool called a nail set. I used a 1/16-inch nail set here.
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A fill stick — basically a thick, waxy crayon — will cover the nail hole. Choose a color similar to the floor itself; slightly darker is better than too light.
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For decking, use a three-inch or 3.5-inch galvanized deck nail to anchor loose boards. Choose spiral-shank or ring-shank; both types grip the wood more strongly than smooth-shank nails. You don’t need a nail set or fill stick.
Floorboards
Job one is to locate the joists — the under-floor beams that the floorboards are fastened to. If the creaking noise is coming from the end of a board, you’re in luck: The ends of each floorboard (where the nails will go) invariably rest on a joist. If the creak is coming from the middle of a board, trace a line (consider using a ruler or other straightedge) from the end of a nearby board to the one that’s creaking, and you’ll find where the joist passes underneath.
If you’ve got a lot of creaky boards, use some painter’s tape or sticky notes to mark them out all at once. They often cluster together, and sometimes one or two new nails in a couple of the boards will silence the whole lot.
The key feature of flooring nails is their narrow head, barely wider than the shank of the nail itself. They’re made that way so that you can drive the nail head below the surface of the board and then conceal the hole. It’s a characteristic of the broad class of trim nails, and for any project where you need a clean finish — if you’re making a picture frame, for example — trim nails are what you want.
Decking
With outdoor decking, the problem is usually boards that have completely detached from the deck framing. The boards are held on with long screws or nails, and after years of exposure to the elements they eventually rust away or simply lose their grip. Loose deck boards usually don’t squeak, but rattle when you step on them or give them a rap with your fist — the easiest ways to locate them.
Repairing a loose deck board is straightforward. Once you’ve identified one, use the original fasteners (or the holes where they used to be) to show you where to place a couple of new nails. Drive them in half an inch or so from the old fasteners, so that they have fresh wood to bite into.
A rotten — not merely loose — board is a different matter. It will exhibit telltale signs: spongy or crumbly areas, lengthwise splits that flex open when you step on them, deep cracks that cut across the grain of the wood. For safety’s sake, don’t try to repair a rotten board. Replace it with a new one. If you find rotten structural beams under the decking, it’s time to get the whole thing professionally rehabbed.
The heads of decking nails, and of construction nails in general, are wide, flat and thin. The wide head resists any effort by the board to pull itself out (if it later warps, for example), and its thin, flat shape lets the head lie flush with the surface.
You’ll find construction nails in a range of sizes at your hardware store; the thinner your boards, the thinner the nail you should choose, to minimize the chance of splitting the wood. For outdoor projects, use nails designated for outdoor work. Most will be zinc galvanized to protect against corrosion. Stainless steel and bronze nails are also available, but much more expensive.
Alternatives and Caveats
The techniques above don’t work in every situation. Wood floors typically have a subfloor — plywood or, in older homes, just cheap lumber — between the floorboards and the joists Sometimes it’s the subfloor that’s squeaking, so nailing down the floorboards doesn’t always fix the problem.
If thin trim nails fail to stop your squeaks, you can try using beefier hardened floor nails with a spiral-shank or ring-shank — similar to the ones we talked about earlier for decks. They clench boards together more tightly. You’ll need a drill, however. Using a bit slightly narrower than the shank of the nail, pre-drill a hole for the nail, so that it won’t split the floorboard when you hammer it in.
There are also special screws that are designed to pull the flooring, subfloor and joists together tightly, and then snap off below the floor’s surface. (Squeeeek No More is probably the best-known brand.) If nailing doesn’t work, they’re worth a shot. Again, you’ll need a drill.
If you have loose parquet floors, they should just be glued down. Parquet boards are essentially wooden tiles. Pull up the loose boards — a thin screwdriver or paint scraper can help pry them out — then apply a layer of wood glue or a thin bead of construction adhesive, set the boards back in place, and hold them down with something heavy until the adhesive sets.
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