Over Spanned Floor Joists

The last thing you want to deal with in your home is a floor that feels unstable. Without the proper supports, however, your floors can start to feel bouncy or uneven. Ideally, the support beams and floor joists in your crawl space are meant to hold up the weight of your home and floor, ensuring that your space is safe to occupy. However, if your floor joists haven’t been properly installed, or if they’ve fallen victim to damage over the years, you may start to see unwanted sinkage in your floor. 

Why do your floor joists start to over span? There are two primary causes: moisture and the weight of your home. 

Contending with Moisture 

Moisture makes its way into your home on a regular basis, but most often in controlled doses. When your crawl space cracks or starts to leak, however, you may find yourself contending with more moisture than your home can reasonably take on. In these cases, you can start to see signs of damage appearing throughout your home. The most common types of crawl space damage  to appear when there’s an excess of moisture in your home include:  

• Warped door frames and window frames 
• Mold 
• Unpleasant smells 
• Dampness on the walls 
• Standing water or seepage 

Of course, your floor joists can also start to over span, making the floor above your crawl space less safe to navigate. If you leave your floor joists unattended for too long, then you may find yourself contending with significant rot and mold growth. 

Bearing the Weight of a Home 

There is also a chance that you may not have enough floor supports in place beneath your home. In these cases, the sheer weight of your home may put too much strain on the floor joists you do have in place. 

If you want to look through a new home to determine whether or not there are enough support structures in place, you can reach out to a professional contractor in your area. Together, you can walk through your crawl space and inspect those supports that you already have. When in doubt, you can invest in both waterproofing measures and additional supports in an attempt to get ahead of the damage that might put your family’s safety at risk.

It can be tempting, when looking at a sagging floor, to try and take on the challenge of repairs on your own. There are ways, after all, to fix a sagging floor. You can install additional supports beneath your sagging floor, even to the point of installing a new plywood layer. Floor joists themselves are relatively straightforward to contend with, as you can use adhesives to secure them in place after removing the ones that have suffered from long-term damage. 

That said, attempting a DIY solution when faced with a sagging floor can put your home at risk for future damage. If, for example, you make a mistake while removing your existing floor joists, then you could face both serious injury and a plummeting home value. You might even make the problem in question worse for yourself. 

DIY Solutions and Future Damage 

If the condition of your floors and crawl space do worsen after you attempt to implement your own repairs to a damaged floor, then future repairs can grow even more complicated for you. Any professional you call in may have to charge you an additional fee to remove the DIY solution you attempted to implement. 

As such, you’ll have spent more money trying to repair your home on your own than you would have had you reached out to a professional in the first place, all without factoring in the cost of materials and any specialty tools you may have needed. 

DIY Solutions Won’t Save You Money 

The problem is that you always want to try and find the source of the unwanted moisture in your home before you invest in floor repairs. If you try to repair your floor before patching the leak in your home, then the continued presence of moisture in your home can rapidly ruin the solution that you spent so much time and money implementing. 

Comparatively, working with a professional from the get-go allows you to save money and to invest in preventative measures after the initial repair work is complete. Not only can you assuage a leak, but you can also confidently watch your home’s value rise as you restore your floors to their original degree of stability.