Lessons learnt the hard way – squeaky floorboards

Having spent a few hours cutting out tongues (from floorboards nothing more sinister), lifting boards, rummaging around underneath them, padding and separating copper pipes with insulation, rescrewing and renailing, I discovered that in fact the easiest way to quieten down squeaky floorboards was to simply rehammer the heads of the nails that hold the boards in place. The boards had worked slightly lose over the last 30 years and a tap or two tightens them up by the half a millimetre or so needed to put them back into place.