Having spent a very high percentage of my wood flooring career coming into contact with the dreaded chipboard squeak, I, like many others just became complacent to the fact. “That’s just chipboard flooring. It squeaks, end of!”. My complacency was the same as everyone else’s. It’s almost like culturally, people had just given up and conceded.

I think most people in life get to the point where they ask defiantly, why? In the context of this article, “why is there not a solution to squeaky chipboard?” There simply is no need for people to have to put up with this late 20th century phenomena. It’s a huge problem, that just required some serious thought.

Let’s make no mistake here. The problem I’m talking about isn’t just a few squeaky areas. Typically, noisy chipboard is a chronic problem. Of course, as spoke about in my previous articles, it’s not just chipboard that’s the problem. There’s an entire compliment of further issues that are just as pervasive.

Twenty years into a very successful wood floor contracting career I decided to come up with a real permanent solution to a problem evidently nobody else could. I set out on an intensive period of research, development, and experimentation. Even looking at and working with a lot of the gadgets and seemingly ingenious suggestions put down by a wealth of cumulative knowledge of people and tradesmen that had come before me. From simply adding additional screws to pushing oils and powders into the chipboard joints. You name it, we’ve tried it!

Overwhelmingly, it was obvious none of the so called fixes out there worked. Properly anyway. Some would work for a day, some a week, and some if we were lucky, a month. Then it became apparent that absolutely none of the solutions solved any of the myriad of other issues we were noticing. For instance, creaks from noggins (Wood cut and positioned between joists to give added support), partition wall base rail fixings (Nails sent through wall base rail timbers and into the chipboard), joist hangers creaking (Typically a very metallic noise where fixing nails rub against the metal hangers), pipes (Pipes rubbing or knocking), and perhaps the most invasive, cracking/popping noises coming from the ceilings below, crooked/warped joists (creating voids at the point of contact with the chipboard), misaligned joists and the list goes on.

It was clear that for a proper solution, this problem required extensive work. Namely, removal of the chipboard, replacement with a far better material, and while we were at it, a number of working strategies to address all the other issues we were coming up against time and again.

That is why our solution is so successful! The time, thought, and experimentation we’ve put in as well as a very intense want to provide something that’s REAL, has all led to a final working knowledgebase and real world solution that nobody else in the UK has.

We have a very particular skill set, developed with a blend of working in the wood flooring industry for collectively over half a century and working in residential properties. When this journey began, I felt we were very well positioned to provide a real solution to this seemingly timeless problem. I was right!

Our very specific set of skills and knowledge towards the problem of squeaky noisy chipboard floors has now been gathering real momentum for some years now.

There’s only one name in this industry that counts!