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.