There are lots of reasons why you don't want your stairs to squeak. It announces to the entire family, for one, when you're heading down to the kitchen in the dark for a midnight snack. Not to mention the fact that
it can be a bit spooky in the dark. So unless you rely on your stairs to
let you know about tardy teenagers coming home past their curfew, you
probably find the squeaking a constant irritation.
It takes dozens of separate pieces to build a hardwood staircase. Stairs
are made up of treads and risers — the flat steps and vertical kick plates you can see — as well as stringers, the saw-tooth pieces of wood that support the stairs from underneath.
With all the wooden parts, it's pretty much inevitable that stairs will
eventually start to squeak. Unlike our own ever-tightening joints, age
tends to bring looseness in stairs. This causes the wooden treads to rub against the risers and stringers, and all of it to grind against the
nails and screws that hold it all together. In addition to simply being
walked on, seasonal contractions and expansions of the wood further
contribute to the loosening of the joints. It can all add up to a
heck of a racket. Stairs that were constructed with glue in addition to
nails and screws — less common the older your house is — generally are less
prone to squeaking, but wear and time do tend to take their toll.
So what do you do to beat the squeak? Most of the time it really
isn't a difficult problem to fix. The noise doesn't mean your stairs are
necessarily about to fall down; they just need tightening up.
There are some repairs that involve fastening wood blocks or brackets
from underneath, which is good on the one hand because your fix will be
invisible. But not everyone has access to the underside of their stairs, and in most cases, tightening on the topside will do the trick.
First you need to identify where exactly within the step the noise is
coming from. Most likely, either the tread is knocking or rubbing
against the riser board, the tread has come loose from one or more of
its stringers, or both. You'll need to test each step that squeaks and
repair it individually by refastening the tread to its underlying
structure at the source of the squeak.
