Sloping floor

[Elisabetta2214]

The floor in one of the bedrooms (upstairs) slopes in one direction and the landing outside seem to slope in the other (ie towards the bedroom). There is no subsidence. Downstairs a partition wall which would have run underneath the landing has been removed. I have been told by a surveyor that the removed wall was not a supporting wall, but could its removal still have contributed to the sloping floors upstairs?

Yes. Surveyor could be wrong. He is not a structural engineer who is an expert on such matters. However, if there are no other signs such as cracks, it may be it is nothing to worry about.

Sorry, should have said , have also had a structural engineer in who also said there were no signs of subsidence and downstairs wall had not been a supporting one

It's just the sloping floor that annoys me. I am also curious as to what has caused it

How old is the house. If 20 years old you might need to investigate further. If 200 years old it might well be a "period feature"!

Built around 1890, so quite old but floors should still be ok IMO

Mine slopes towards the centre of the house. The old steel beam supporting the ground floor has given in. Ideally I should crawl under the ground floor and investigate, probably replace the beam. This is not structural.

I also have one side of the house sloping to the side (neighbour's house is underpinned). Now that is structural, my surveyor said historic, but I have a feeling it still moves.

I was told that sloping floors can sometimes also be caused by dry rot in the supporting woodwork under the floor. Could that be it? Although our Victorian house has a few sloping floors but no underlying problems. Could just be a quirk?

Thanks for your suggestions - I think we might have a look under the floorboards before we change the carpets, see what's going on underneath

Same problems here. The floor in one bedroom slopes from back to front and the floor on the landing outside slopes from left to right. Supporting wall was removed over 20 years ago. House was built around 100 years ago.

Before we bought the house we had a structural engineer look at the issues and he reported back in much the same way as yours has. So no problems!

I agree though that it is annoying. I often sit in bed looking at the sloping floor and imagine the whole house slipping over.

We recently had some more alterations done to the house. The architect described the sloping floors as 'part of the charm' and the structural engineer was not fazed, although recommended steels to support the walls when we opened up the kitchen.

Sorry wall that was removed downstairs was a partition wall not a supporting wall.

There are no flat floors in our house (well, the ground floor is fairly flat, since it had concrete poured all over it c. 1985, but still not actually flat, as the poor tiler discovered when he did the kitchen floor). We have been assured by all concerned that it is nothing to worry about, but it is annoying at times. More annoying is how much some of the floors move and the fact that as a result we can't get our shower to seal properly .

I put up a shelf in one of DS's cupboards and discovered that the floor drops off by about 6" across the width of the cupboard (about 3ft).

stealthsquiggle I have the same, i.e. flexing bath on a wonky floor and leakage effectively. I ended up getting U shaped shower curtain pole.

We are also limited to the way we can put furniture. For example a wardrobe placed on a higher end could fall down on us. I hate it and considering moving in to new-built-all-flat-concrete-floor type of property!

Elisabetta - it is the joists you need to look at, not the floor boards. It is unlikely your engineer looked at these as they are covered up! These may be inadequate, and that is quite normal for an old house, but it may be a problem. The engineer should also check they are embedded in the walls correctly. Can you get another engineer to look at the joists while the floor boards are exposed? It would just need a few taken up to give access to the joists.

Also stealth, if your floors are moving, the same problem may apply to you.

We have this in our Georgian house. Narrow beams (thinner than Victorian ones), no noggins and modern furniture = stress on floors. So we had boards lifted. Joists reinforced, noggins put in, boards laid down again on level joists and we now have solid, straight floors. We've done the ground floor, now just need to do one more floor (next yr). Friends had similar issues on a Victorian property on their ground floor...usually result of previous peoples building work. Ie: running hot water pipes through joists and wrecking them a bit etc.

Stealth - sounds a lot like round top floor, pls get those joists looked at... By removing the boards. Seriously. I bet some are not attached properly at the wall or have serious bowing...

The floor that is most sloping is not going anywhere - that bit of the house used to be a mill. The moving floor is at the other end of the house and there we may have an issue, I agree.

I had this in a Georgian stately home, where the ceiling in the staff accommodation was bowing due to pressure from the billiard room above (I am not making this up, honestly!) I basically divided the downstairs room into three, creating two new supporting walls in the process, and the act of doing this reduced the bowing. (It also gave us a proper hotel quality laundry room, decent staff kitchen and discreet boiler room rather than just one big empty space that was under-utilised, but that's another story). The walls have been there for 20+ years now and seem to be doing fine.

Oh, and also - the floor that drops off so much across the width of a cupboard is actually sloping down towards the outside wall, so definitely not worried about that one (in all probability, the centres of the beams sprang up when the load of the millstones was removed a hundred years or more ago).

The moving floor, OTOH, does sit above where a downstairs partition wall was removed at some point. It was replace by a sodding great big beam, but I think the joists between the beams are the issue.

Thank you Millymolly, yes, we'll definitely get a structural engineer to look under floorboards. I'd like to get it checked now you mention it

If a wall drops off towards an exterior wall, it might be a sign the exterior wall has settled at some point. Many years ago, mills and houses were built without builders having an understanding of ground conditions and the need for deep foundations, eg on clay, near trees etc. Therefore foundations tended to be shallow and buildings move. Sometimes corrective action was taken, but sometimes people didn't bother, especially if it was a place of work. Or patching up was carried out. This does not mean there is necessarily a problem and it is part of the history of the house/mill.