How to Deal With Sagging Floors When Buying or Selling a Home

A sagging, uneven, or springy floor can be the result of many different issues in a home. In fact, this kind of issue is often the result of a mix of underlying issues that all must be addressed to get a solid solution. 

Structural Damage 

The whole structure of your property is reliant on every part of itself to ensure optimum support and stability. While some parts of a home are particularly important, like the foundation, for example, any serious structural damage in your home can feasibly lead to issues like sagging or uneven flooring. In fact, if the issues are left to grow unchecked, they could lead to the collapse of affected walls and floors. With that said, the issues most likely to cause sagging floors are issues in your property’s foundation. 

Settlement, subsidence, and lateral movement can all cause sufficient damage to the supports and joists inside your crawl space and lead to a sagging or uneven floor. Each of these issues is most likely to be caused by problematic foundation soils. Expansive soils, for example, are very unstable and swell or shrink depending on their saturation. This can cause sinking or settlement. Weak or loose soils, by contrast, can be washed or blown away and cause settlement as a result of voids being formed under or around your home. Either way, foundation damage is a common cause of sagging flooring. 

Rotted Floor Joists 

A more localized cause of sagging flooring is some kind of damage to the joists that support your property’s flooring. Joists that cannot support the weight they were intended to are known as over spanned joists, and they can come about as a result of damage, decay, or poor design. Rotted floor joists fall into the category of decay or damage and are hard to deal with. 

Joists that are failing as a result of rot will fail more slowly than those that are failing because of deep cracks or structural movement. This means you will have a little more time to act. You will first notice a slight spring or bounce in your flooring. This will develop into a defined sag and could eventually lead to the collapse of the floor as a whole. 

Damaged flooring can be hard to tackle, and for this reason, many homeowners are tempted to simply replace the flooring once the issue progresses to a certain point. However, this is not always the best option (or even a viable option). 

When To Replace 

There are some cases in which replacing a whole floor is the appropriate choice, but this is far less common than you might think. In fact, replacing a sagging floor is almost never the best option, because it is extremely time-consuming, disruptive, and costly. What’s worse, simply replacing the floor will not address the underlying issues that led to the damage in the first place. 

This means that you will have to deal with the cost of replacing the floor, as well as the cost of installing repair solutions to address the underlying causes. The only situation in which it is best to replace the whole floor is when the wood rot has spread throughout the floorboards, as well as the joists and supports. In this case, it would be dangerous to keep the floor at all. 

When To Repair 

As you might imagine, we feel that it is far better to repair your property’s flooring unless it would be actively dangerous not to. Thankfully, it is far easier to repair a sagging floor than to replace it these days, even when the joists are rotted. From crawl space jacks that can be used to add extra support to chemical treatments to kill the rot, there is a plethora of options on the market. 

You should have the advice and guidance of a professional during this process to make sure that you are getting the right solution for your home. In most cases, the repair process will be complex and will require a combination of solutions to ensure that each underlying cause and co-occurring issue are resolved. Finally, you should remember that the best time to repair your property’s flooring is immediately after spotting the warning signs. Structural repairs are best carried out early. 

Unlike traditional piers, crawl space jacks are adjustable and designed specifically to support and lift floor joists, making them ideal for correcting sagging floors directly.