Go to any Home Depot or similar store and buy yourself some adhesive felt pads, which you can easily attach to the underside of the legs/feet/bases of your furniture.

I already have those pads on all furniture feet that're on wood floors, so they won't scratch the wood. (DH would hang me from the rafters if anything happened to those precious heart-pine floors. *snicker*) Upstairs, where the floors are bounciest, the furniture is on carpet so I'm not quite certain what little felt pads would do?

Simply having the felt under the feet isn't going to help. You need to wedge cardboard or wood under those feet to level them off. It sounds like the floor isn't level therefore the furniture isn't sitting square on the floor which causes the knocking noise when your DH walks.
It's a trial and error process.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. All four feet on each piece are on the floor (although it does torque one older table rather oddly, I need to get something better to shim it). The furniture's not rocking back and forth on two legs, which HAD been my first thought since I've had that problem in heaven knows how many other places, it's the floors' bouncing making the drawers and doors shake in the frames. What we actually need to do is pull down most of the ceilings in the first floor and either sister or brace the second-floor joists, pour some extra footings down cellar and put in some lally columns as well as sister/brace the first-floor joists. 'Spensive, so it's going to be a while while urgent things like the botched heating system get taken care of. I gave up and jammed bits of cardboard - goodness knows we've still got enough boxes around - in each drawer front so I could sleep... not elegant in the least, but it keeps me from wanting to take a sledgehammer to it.

Are you saying the floorboards are sort of flexing between the floor joists? I'm assuming your sistering or bracing of the joists would limit this movement. I can see how the flexing would send vibrations through the furniture and make the drawers rattle, even with all four legs evenly on the floor. Would make me nuts!

Just curious, but do you know what the spacing is between your joists? I always thought 16" was the standard, but not necessarily so. When we considered removing the non-loadbearing wall between two bedrooms, our contractor told us that our floorboards in that section of the house (at least in the attic) were 24" apart. In any event, I just wondered if your boinging floor could be due to the distance between your joists, which might add more play to the boards?

I can commiserate with your hierarchy of intertwining repairs. When the jobs are really big, it's such a budget buster! We have a few exterior projects that have to be done at the same time so we've had to hold off for a couple of years (retaining walls, underground drainage, driveway paving and a large dying tree). I don't even want to do the math.

It's actually the whole floor "unit" going boingy-boing, almost like a trampoline. The joist spacing is 16" OC, give or take a tad, we can tell that upstairs by the pattern of cracks in the LR ceiling that very neatly follow the joists and crossing thingies between them! *wry grin* The joist span is not unreasonable, the joists we can see down cellar are nice big solid boards, no sign of termite or powderpost beetle, to the best of our knowledge they weren't chopped up to run plumbing or heating ducts. The floors themselves are actually almost 1 1/2" thick on the first floor - 3/4" pine board subfloor and 3/4" pine "decorative" floor (real 3/4", too, not this "nominal" crap! LOL) - the second floor has only the the 3/4" board subfloor. I plan on bringing in an engineer to look at it next year and we'd start with the least-invasive action first, which would probably be more footers and lally columns. (There's no bulkhead, so everything coming in or going out will have to go through the kitchen, what grand fun! Not.) What's aggravating is that we didn't really notice the bounce until we got furniture in and dishes in the cupboards and the rattle-bang started up, it would have been a strike against the house as would a dozen other things our home inspector (who has a good reputation around here and is supposedly clueful about old houses, we wonder if he just had an off day or what?) missed.

Yeah, we've got some exterior biggies too so I sympathize, including driveway paving, although we have to start from scratch - we don't have one at all! That was supposed to have happened this fall but the buyer for the other house fell through and now we've taken a $20k price cut trying to just get the damn thing sold, so we'll be following the example of previous owners/renters and parking on the lawn when we're under snow ban. Trashy but better than getting towed. *eyeroll* That $20k was supposed to be the driveway and the bathroom, along with part of ripping out the new-but-still-horrible carpet upstairs. We had had dreams of this nice little parking area done up with those pretty brick-look pavers with a front sidewalk to match, so period-perfect you could barf, but unless we win the lottery I think it's just going to be your basic asphalt splotch. :-( Tree work is on our agenda too, some of it HAS to be done next month to prevent damage to the house from winter storms but hopefully the rest can be put off for a few years. There's one tree in the yard that we call the "grandfather tree" that's easily 6 feet in diameter that I want to have looked at so we know what needs to be done to keep it healthy, because it looks like another similarly sized tree came down in the last decade or so although thankfully it went across the gully behind the house and not on top of it!

Hi johnmari- I have a roll of that hook & loop tape (velcro) with adhesive on both portions that is exposed when you remove the backing. I have found if you use just the soft loop side and cut a good sized piece you can use it to stop a lot of those types of rattles. Hope it works for you.

Paul