Persimmon Homes Noisy Floors

[Nick]

Tony,

I will be writing to Persimmon shortly.

Hi E. A. Tay,

Your problems sound very similar. What did Persimmon adjust? Were Persimmon prepared to admit that there was a problem?

[karen]

Dear Nick,

I have a George Wimpey home and have been in 12 months, I too have had very noisy foorboards in all of the upstairs rooms. The worst room was bedroom 4 which had an horrendous creak, which luckily they have fixed by taking up the carpet and skirting board off and putting a wedge and some nails in. On the landing they couldn't fix it so they had to cut out a piece of floorboard and strengthen it and then apply more nails, this did seem to rectify it but after a week I still have a slight noise. Bedroom 1 they have fixed one creak but this seems to have made other areas worse so I may have to call them back again or live with it!. Bedroom 2 had a bad creak in the middle of the floor so in order for them to roll the carpet back further enough I had to remove everything out of the room apart from the bed. This was a massive job, as it was my daughters room full of toys etc. This is better but there are still noises when you walk - the maintenance team has told me these noises now are probably coming from the ceiling downstairs so there's not a lot they can do about it.

I also have creaks in my bathrooms - when you walk on the tiles, in the shower tray, and when you sit on the toilet. Apparantly the can't do anything in these rooms as we have tiled floors and they wont take these up!

The work took 2 days to do, which wasn't too bad but you can do without the hastle of moving all of your furniture and just the pain of having builders in and out of your house all of the time.

Have you had other problems with your house? I suspect you have.



Karen

[twub]

Dear Karen,

Just to confuse things Nick is now twub.

It sounds like your problems are much worse than mine.

I have two very active kids who bounce around upstairs so I have lots of noise coming through to the rooms below. I guess this would be the case for any type of house construction.

Persimmon have looked/listened to my floors and do not consider them too noisy to require remedial work. Persimmon claim that the floors are constructed to be creak free under normal walking loads but not kids jumping off beds. However this creak free status only applies to people walking around like angels not the normal crash and bang of daily family life.

I have decided that 3 of the bedrooms are just ok and I will put up with occassional foot fall noise but I will continue to chase on bedroom 3.

twub

[Chuck Sidfrum]

I have two very active kids who bounce around upstairs so I have lots of noise coming through to the rooms below. I guess this would be the case for any type of house construction.

Persimmon have looked/listened to my floors and do not consider them too noisy to require remedial work. Persimmon claim that the floors are constructed to be creak free under normal walking loads but not kids jumping off beds. However this creak free status only applies to people walking around like angels not the normal crash and bang of daily family life.

twub

The NHBC writes an interesting document (propaganda?) for the builders, which claims noisy floors, deflection etc are normal. However, privately to the builder, they advise them the common causes of this very common problem and tells them how to avoid it, as well as informing them (as they know) how very expensive these issues can be to fix after occupation.

Vibration - aka bouncy, springy.
Deflection - from floor board, or from floor joists - they are different things.
Noisy - ignoring lack of insulation, cracking, squeaking sounds, especially those heard from below.
Unlevel - usually only spotted under a door.

These issues can often require floor strengthening, usually in the form of joist bridging. Having spent nearly 4 years, just to get the builder to admit to the issue onsite, I suspect it to be a long time before they actually fix it.

Investigations have been delayed, we have been misled, and unsurprisingly the builder in our case has a 10 year history (of denial, delay, and fixing whole estate). Every site I visited had the same issue. Now on our estate, 80% are being fixed or due to be fixed - although we await proper methodical professional action. The other 20% covers the show home (strange it was the only home unaffected), and home that were already fixed or settled, or were not interested in the hassle of pursing a fix.

I will be posting detailed information in the near future to help others with this type of issue.

My suggestion is to get it fixed, and use someone other than the builder (e.g. NHBC or your own surveyor) to give the professional opinion.

The lowest specification of I-Beam Joist has a Serviceability Index of 1.00, the builder used an SI of 1.06 on ours, yet they claimed 'highest specification', amongst other things. Buyers and Surveyors are starting to be more aware, certain floor issues should not be present, despite what the builder claims.