Two build eras, two different squeaks
East York splits neatly into two cohorts, and they fail differently. The 1920s and 1930s streets that followed the viaduct are small detached and semi-detached houses on narrow lots, built when a nailed plank subfloor laid across dimensional joists was still standard practice. Those squeak at the board-to-nail connection after a century of seasonal movement. The late-1940s veterans’ housing built around Topham Park is a second wave entirely, simpler single-detached homes put up quickly and cheaply, where the squeak is more often a subfloor panel that never sat flat on the joist to begin with. We check which cohort a house belongs to before we decide whether to work from above or from the basement.