saggingfloors

saggingfloors

SAGGING FLOORS FAQ

Structural Pros

The existence of a sagging floor can lead to a lot of questions, especially if you don’t know a lot about the processes behind sagging floors. Here are all the answers you need for those questions.

Why Is My Floor Sagging?

Squeaky and sagging floors happen because your floor doesn’t have the support it needs. Your floor joists need to be able to hold up the weight of your home, and if they can’t, you’ll end up with sagging floors. There are many reasons you can end up with support that’s not strong enough.

If you’re starting to notice sagging joists, there’s a problem going on behind the scenes. Here are some of the most common reasons for them.

Poor Support Design

The initial design of your home has to be able to hold up the weight on top of it. Unfortunately, if the original design isn’t strong enough, you can end up with over spanned floor joists. That means the support columns are improperly spaced, causing the design to put too much weight on the floor joists underneath.

This poor design can reach through other parts of the home as well. A poor support design can itself cause gaps between walls and floors, squeaky floors, cracks in the drywall and a variety of other problems. Plus, you never know what other parts of the home suffer from the same poor design.

House Settling

Your home is going to settle over the years; that’s a normal part of what happens to your home over time. However, if your home starts to settle unevenly or too quickly, you’ll start to notice problems like sagging floors, squeaky floors, and cracked bricks.

A sagging floor from home settling will cause bigger problems than just the floor. The settling can be very damaging to your foundation as a whole, especially if it’s settling more on one side than the other. It’s incredibly important to pay attention to the home settling issues you’re having, regardless of how “bad” it looks from the top.

Waterproofing Issues

Sagging floor joists can also happen if your crawl space or basement isn’t properly waterproofed. A proper waterproofing job should avoid and prevent both standing water and humidity in the area. Either one of these things can cause serious problems along the underside of your home.

If your home doesn’t have adequate waterproofing in the crawl space, you may start to see sagging floor joists because of serious rotting and molding problems. Those problems with moisture can also reach up to the rest of your home, causing molding in the home walls, cracking due to humidity, and more.

Sure, a sagging floor can be annoying. However, the cost of home repair may put you off in some ways from tackling the issue. Many homeowners wonder whether sagging floor repair is actually a necessity or if it’s just an option.

In fact, you should try to fix sagging floor and crawl space issues as soon as possible. These are just a few of the reasons you may want to handle sagging joists right now.

Cosmetic Issues

This might not be high on your personal list, but it’s an important thing to note nonetheless. It’s true that sagging floors are a pretty big cosmetic eyesore, which can be annoying.

Not only is the floor itself a cosmetic problem, but it can also wreak havoc on your internal decorating. If a sagging floor is sagging too far, you may have problems with putting up chairs, tables, bookcases, and other décor because it’s impossible for your floor to hold these things up.

When you contact a Structural Pros expert to help you fix sagging floor joists, you no longer have to worry about these cosmetic problems. You can instead enjoy your home more fully.

Tripping Hazard

In some cases, a sunken floor can also be a tripping hazard. Your brain typically expects to be walking on stable ground, and if the ground slopes downward, you may end up tripping over it.

Of course, this is most difficult for elderly and disabled individuals who may have a difficult time walking even on stable surfaces. However, don’t make the mistake of assuming you won’t be impacted by it. You may end up tripping even on surfaces that don’t seem extremely uneven.

Leveling sagging floor joists can help with this problem. If you’re noticing a tripping hazard due to floor sagging in your home, a Structural Pros expert may be able to help you fix it.

Complete Collapse

In the worst-case scenario, the floor can completely collapse underneath you. This typically only happens if the floor has been sagging for a very long time and you haven’t done anything about it, but if you don’t handle the sagging home joists, it’s definitely a potential problem.

As you continue to ignore this problem, you’ll start to put undue stress on the sagging floor joists, which will cause them to sag more and more. Eventually, they can break entirely.

The best way to avoid having your floor literally collapse underneath you is to contact a Structural Pros expert, who will be able to help you repair your sagging floor joists. That way, you don’t have to worry about the problems getting worse.

A common fix for sagging floor joists involves sistering the joists, which describes the process of placing additional stabilization underneath them. This can be very helpful, and it’s a method Structural Pros experts can help you complete. However, just sistering them on your own won’t actually fix the problem.

Although you can do some of these repairs on your own, it’s a good idea to get a Structural Pros expert involved instead. Here’s why.

Not an Easy Fix

Sistering a joint can sound like an easy fix for a sagging floor crawl space. After all, you just have to place something underneath the sagging areas in the crawl space, right? Is it really that difficult to accomplish?

The thing is, it’s not as easy as it may look at first. In fact, you need to make sure you’re sistering the joint at the right place if you want to be effective in leveling sagging floor joists.

The only way you’re going to get a thorough and effective fix is to get an expert who actually knows how to fix the problem. Contact a Structural Pros expert for more about how to fix this issue.

Temporary Fixes Don’t Work 

A main issue you may discover with trying to repair sagging floor joists on your own is that it simply doesn’t work for very long. If you put a minor amount of effort into a temporary fix, that temporary nature is going to shine through dramatically.

In many cases, simply sistering the sagging joints will only provide a bit of relief. It’ll likely only fix your problem for a short period of time, after which the problem can come back with a vengeance.

It’s worth investing time and money into the problem to make sure your sagging floor gets fixed by a professional. When you need to repair a sagging floor joist, you should consult a Structural Pros expert who can actually fix the problem for good.

You Need to Tackle the Underlying Problem

The most important reason you can’t just go in and sister the joint yourself is that it might not fix the problem. That might be an effective fix if the floor joist being unsupported is truly the only problem, but chances are, it’s not.

If you’re dealing with moisture in your crawl space, a structure that simply isn’t sound, or poor planning throughout the home, your sagging floor joists are just symptoms of a bigger problem. You need to handle those problems before you handle the sagging floors.

A Structural Pros professional will help you determine the problem. With your free inspection from Structural Pros, you’ll be able to understand more about your home problems and discover more about how to fix them.