O'BERRY Enterprises 3251 Squeak Replacement Screw (250)

I live in the 1st floor of a 2-family house and the floor squeeks are horrendous. I found these screws do work though alot of them are needed. Most of them seemed to not go into the floor joists since the house is older and nothing was constructed using a tape measure it seems.I realized a good way to locate the framing is to use a thin drill bit and drill up into the ceiling from the floor below. My ceiling is the trowel looking plaster surface so filling in the holes afterwards was easy with some light weight spackle. Takes alot of trial and error to locate the joists but when you do just map it out, I measured from the walls and made a nice diagram showing where the joists were located. Then when upstairs just use a tape measure and measure off the walls and you should hit the joists.I must have used 3 of these 50 packs of screws and i just ordered another pack because theres more squeeks that have developed upstairs. I dont think you can use enough of these screws, buy extra because you will probably use them all.Installing the screws is super easy using the kit. Once the screw is in place I just use a large pair of pliars and snap the heads off. Cant even tell any work was done.

This is the real deal. Worked great, didn't break off too soon. Tried other ones with same name but fake, broke off before I could screw it all the way down.

After hearing some ridiculous contractor quotes, I went online looking for a solution to my impossibly squeaky floors. We have a cat and you could hear the thing walking they were so bad. The hardware store guys told me you just learn to live with it...after four years in this house I was going crazy. Saw this thing demo'd online and gave the starter set a try. They're not perfect, but when you can find a joist they work very well.Couple things:- if you have an older home with older hardwoods, the holes are nearly invisible among the other surface imperfections. Make sure you pick up a couple colors of wood putty, one darker than your floors and one lighter, so that you can mix them like play-dough and get your color right.- That's important because the screws do not always snap off - I'd say it works about 80-85% of the time. The little tool they give you does not snap the screws as neatly as they show in the video. And in working it around, you enlarge your holes a bit. Or sometimes the screw doesn't generate enough torque to snap before it just starts chewing through the wood and you're just spinning. Then you back it out and either put it in planning to snap it or just fill the hole you create during the mangling process to break it off.- I found these to be useless between joists. Probably a personal situation with our house and the old nails, but the only sound reduction came when the flooring was re-secured to the joists.- In an old house, not all of the joists are 16" apart. Fortunately our basement is unfinished and I was able to see a lot of the time where I was going wrong. Some areas were covered, however, and then it's hide and see. I looked far and wide for a good stud finder that could penetrate 2" of hardwoods and subfloor. Bosch has one that said it could but home depot had stopped carrying it at the store I tried. I found when hunting for a joist that normally the worst of the squeak was directly at the joist. If you can use a finger and create the squeak (vs. jumping on it), you're probably very close.I'm about 200 screws in at this point and have only had one pre-break below the surface but not at the 1/8" that they specify. I find that they torque up a little better if you're going slow so I have a reasonable speed going until I get close to the guard and then slow appreciably. At that point, I'm drilling no faster than I could by hand which seems to work the best.Overall, considering that I had no way to approach some of my floors from underneath, that even if I had, the option of nailing a 2"x4" to the joist and then angling up into the sub-floor sounded like a true waste of time, I think these are the greatest invention I could have asked for. Even using the square drill attachment (vs. say a Phillips) was genius as you never strip a screw.My entire toolkit for this is a set of vise grips, a long paperclip (bend it in half so you don't drop it), tape measure, putty, flashlight, some tape to mark the joist centers and a drill. I'd rate it very easy on the difficulty scale. It is time-consuming, however, and you go through screws like crazy. 6 joists per avg bedroom x 11 feet x 2-3 screws per foot and you're easily over 100 per room even if you're just attacking the squeaky spots (if your rooms are as noisy as ours were).Sweet bliss coming into the house now - I'm almost afraid to walk on them.Good luck!Update - 2 weeks later - couple hundred more screws in place. Still a fan - figured out two things:1) they will quiet spaces between joists, just put in a grid, spacing them 4" apart, so in 1 sq. ft, you'll use around 16 screws to silence it. compare that to a joist, where you get about 3" of silence on either side when you can snug the floor back down to the joist. ups your total per room substantially. i picked up a 500 pack for the weekend.2) resist the temptation to rock the screw head back and forth to minimize floor damage - hold the tool like an airplane thrust lever and push forward only. faster and less frustrating.

These are a good solution for older homes that may have original hardwood floors where the nail holes holding the subfloor and joist together have become larger than the nails themselves over time due to expansion and contraction.Nonetheless, it's good to know how your floor was constructed to be able to maximize their effectiveness. If you can see the joists below on a 1st floor for example, it helps a lot. If you are on a second floor, you are trying to locate joists and sometimes it is impossible that you end up just putting in a bunch of these anyway. In my 100 year old house, the subfloor is actually comprised of 1 inch boards so there is more potential for squeaks to come from the hardwood floor and subfloor and the subfloor and joist.At the same time, depending on how thick the hardwood and subfloor are these may not be effective regardless. They are also hit or miss if they will break off as you torque them down. In my particular case, I gave up on using the "hardwood" slot in the tool and just used the "softwood" part. For my floors, I felt the "softwood" part wouldn't allow the screw to get deep enough so I would remove tool and tightened them down another couple turns. That seemed to help a lot for reducing noise while still being able to break them off manually.For some squeaks, you may end up making your floor look like swiss cheese if you really want to eliminate it completely. In many cases, the squeak will dampen a bit and that was good enough for me. If you find a good wood putty color match, the holes are not noticeable at all. I assume in many homes that would find these screws useful, the floors are going to have their own character from wear and tear from decades of use that it will just blend in anyway.They do make a longer version of these screws designed for decking, but I haven't been able to find a box of 250 of them like you can buy here. For the longer ones, it seems you have to buy the "starter kit" each time of 50 that comes with the breakaway die.

Rename it “squeak” no more.