Best Way To Find Floor Joists

We have had a frozen waterpipe there and i want to check for damage to the pipe a.

Best way to find floor joists. Just the way you need to find a wall stud before you can attach anything to a wall you need. Since any nails or screws you insert in the hardwood floor must anchor into a joist locating them is the first step in any. Once the flooring such as hardwood is installed there is little reason to locate the joists unless you are fixing a squeak. For example if you need to repair a squeaky floor you will need to be able to find the locations of joists in order to correct the problem.

After all joists are essentially just large studs in the floor. While renovating our barn house we quickly found out how hard it is to find a stud in the wall using one of those electronic stud finders you see at the hardware store we plugged in a battery and it beeped booped in the most random ways possible as we tried to use it. Once you find the two ends of the joists drive small nails in each end and snap a chalk line between the nails. I even held it up to part of the wall that we cut away exposing the stud in the open section and it still couldn t find.

Common sense tells you that large floor joists can carry more load and spacing joists closer together also increases the load bearing capacity of a floor. Fortunately if your stud finder has a deep scanning option you can use it to find the joists under the carpet. Typically this is the shorter distance between exterior walls unless there are interior load bearing walls used to break up the span. But larger is not always better when builders are constructing a home or adding a room addition.

The extra two inches of vertical distance when a floor is framed with 2 x 10 joists rather than 2 x 12s can be quite important for example. I want to know where the floor joists are inside a small closet because i may need to make an additional trap door to access the crawl space nearby under our kitchen. The notching and boring rules of thumb for solid lumber are shown in fig. The easiest way to find out if your floor is out of plane is to use the time honored marble method.

The joists should be at the squeak you just need to determine the direction of the joists. The wooden beams that support a subfloor are called joists. You can notch and bore joists without sacrificing critical strength but you must follow the rules. Follow the rules to keep your floor solid.

Some stud finders have a deep penetrating settings that might find a joist through carpet. Locating floor joists under carpet. Find the joists on one side of the room and then move to the opposite side of the room. Drop a few marbles onto the floor in various areas around the room and then watch them roll.