My house is seven years old and I've been living here since it was new. It started out quiet but over the years it's become kind of a nightmare for someone who doesn't like things to make noise. I have lived in a lot of homes and this one is by and far the loudest of them. Pipes in the walls make ticking noises. Subfloors make all kinds of noise. The bedroom subfloor is the worst. It pops all over the place whenever someone walks on it. It's worst in the summer but still annoying in the winter. I have an office that has walls that make numerous loud crackling noises whenever anyone walks into it. It all seems very cheaply built. A cheap engineered wood flooring was used and it makes a ton of noise. Best I can tell, the nails that they used to nail it down didn't stick well in the subfloor and there's a lot of movement. The builder is known in the area as being pretty bad and has moved on from building in the state of Colorado. Of course I did not know this when I bought the house or I'd have looked elsewhere.
Anyway, there's this one noise that I've been trying to fix for two months now. It is a popping noise in the floor by an outside wall. Sometimes it is silent and sometimes it pops every ten or fifteen seconds. I sit right by it and it's making me want to fix it with a sledgehammer. There is a drain pipe that runs from the second floor and connects to the drain pipe in the basement. I thought that maybe it was that pipe rubbing against the hole in the subfloor and causing the noise. I tried all sorts of methods to shut it up. I put pieces of shims around the pipe to tighten it up and tried hanging it a little tighter. Literally nothing that I've done has made a single bit of difference. I noticed that it is bad today (it's 2 degrees out right now) so I went into the basement to listen and it seems more likely that it is coming from the sill plate in that area. The builder sprayed pink foam along the top of the basement wall but somehow missed that entire area. I can see that there is some kind of thing white foam between the sill plate and the basement. I put a couple of wood shims in to try and silence it but of course that didn't do anything. The weight of an entire house is not intimidated by a couple of shims.
I have no idea why this noise is happening. It's new this year (every year is a new noise in this place). I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done about it or if I'm even correct about the source of the noise. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
Anyway, there's this one noise that I've been trying to fix for two months now. It is a popping noise in the floor by an outside wall. Sometimes it is silent and sometimes it pops every ten or fifteen seconds. I sit right by it and it's making me want to fix it with a sledgehammer. There is a drain pipe that runs from the second floor and connects to the drain pipe in the basement. I thought that maybe it was that pipe rubbing against the hole in the subfloor and causing the noise. I tried all sorts of methods to shut it up. I put pieces of shims around the pipe to tighten it up and tried hanging it a little tighter. Literally nothing that I've done has made a single bit of difference. I noticed that it is bad today (it's 2 degrees out right now) so I went into the basement to listen and it seems more likely that it is coming from the sill plate in that area. The builder sprayed pink foam along the top of the basement wall but somehow missed that entire area. I can see that there is some kind of thing white foam between the sill plate and the basement. I put a couple of wood shims in to try and silence it but of course that didn't do anything. The weight of an entire house is not intimidated by a couple of shims.
I have no idea why this noise is happening. It's new this year (every year is a new noise in this place). I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done about it or if I'm even correct about the source of the noise. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
