I live in an old apartment building, as is typical in Berlin. The pipes that drive the hot water to the heaters are exposed. They're also too close to the wooden floors.
As the pipes heat up, I suppose they force the wood to heat up as well. So it expands. The floorboards don't have much space to expand, so I guess they bump into one another. The noise that stems from that is hideous. A constant cracking, once per second, sometimes building up to a major noise followed by a minute or two of silence.
(It's impossible to sleep with this.)
My question: should I cut extra space around the wood? Would that be enough? Or, as the building is old, will it be a more structural problem?
If you think having a carpenter take a look at it would help, let me know.