Remove Existing Floor With Ease

Since I’ve been in the building business practically all of my life, I’ve decided I want to share some of the techniques and methods that I have accumulated that helped me to simplify my building business. When I say, simplify I mean using little tricks that I’ve picked up over the years to make life a lot easier when doing any type of building project.

So the purpose of this, how do I section is for you to ask me how to go about doing something whether it be a repair or part of a remodeling project that you’re doing yourself, that just might help you get things done more smoothly and in less time and hopefully helping you to save money in the process.

How do I remove my existing vinyl floor and underlayment and what is the easiest way to do it?

I recently had a neighbor come up to me to tell me that he was having a new tile floor put into his kitchen. Since it was one of the houses that we built several years ago he thought that I would know how he should go about removing the existing vinyl floors.

He told me that there were two layers of vinyl that had been put down. When we built the house, we put down a layer of quarter inch luan underlayment and on top of that mastic or glue and the vinyl floor itself.

Later another owner of a home, had installed another layer of luan underlayment put down over of the existing vinyl floor and then installed a new vinyl floor over to luan underlayment.

So now they have two layers of vinyl flooring and to layers of luan underlayment that has to be removed. I asked my neighbor how he was going to go about doing this and he told me that he was going to start at one end and try to peel up the vinyl floor and roll it up and remove it.

Of course having run into this situation many times in my years of business in the building industry, I told him there was a much simpler way to accomplish this. Knowing the house, I recalled there was a step down form the kitchen into the family room.

There was a metal bull nosing that had been installed along the edge of the step that covered over the edge of the vinyl flooring and underlayment. I told him to remove the metal and then look at the edge of the floor surfaces that would be revealed once the metal was removed.

So the first step that one would take in preparation of taking up the old flooring would be to get a measuring tape and measure the thickness of the layers of underlayment and vinyl flooring. In this case each layer of underlayment would be one quarter of an inch thick and the vinyl about 1/8 of an inch each. This would make the total thickness about three quarters of an inch.

The next step would be to take a circular saw and set the blade to the thickness of the layers which we just concluded was three quarters of an inch. In this case you would take your saw and start cutting from the edge of the revealed layers and gradually lower the saw blade of a circular saw into the floor holding it firmly.

It would be best to use some type of a carbide tip saw blade that would be capable of cutting through the thin wire staples that were used to attach the quarter-inch luan underlayment. After lowering the blade into the floor the idea would be to cut out small sections in the floor anywhere from 1 foot square to 3 feet square.

After cutting the first square you can take a pry bar and a hammer and get the pry bar to go under the edge of one side of the square and work with it until you can pry this entire square up.

After this you can continue to cut squares next to the one you just cut and then using either the pry bar or even better a floor scraper you can continue to pop up the squares until the entire floor is removed. The nice thing about this is that all the layers come up at one time along with most of the staples and you can easily throw them into a dumpster.

Another question that comes up when removing floors with this method is, what do you do around the cabinets?

This will probably be the most difficult part of removing the floors. In most cases the first layer of underlayment was put down prior to the installation of the cabinets. This means that the cabinets are resting on that first layer of underlayment.

So unless you are going to replace the cabinets, you have to find a way to remove the underlayment that is around the base of the cabinets.

What I do is take the reciprocating saw, also known as the sawsall, and using an all-purpose medium length saw blade, I gradually lower the blade with the saw running, down until the tip of the blade hits the floor that’s right along the edge of the cabinet base and while cutting I pull the saw slowly along the edge.

The trickiest part of doing this is that you have to hold the saw on an angle when cutting under the toe kicks of the cabinets. I do this until I have gone around the edges of the entire base cabinets.

Once you’ve done this just pop up the remaining pieces and discard them. To continue the prep work for the new tile floor you will need to remove or pound down any remaining staples or pieces of staples that are in the subfloor. Now the floor will be ready for a layer of cement board underlayment and of course the new tile.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that you get back down to the original subfloor and after you install the cement board and tile, the dishwasher will still fit under the counter and over the floor and you will still have most of the toe kick showing on your base cabinets.

I’m not saying that this is a really easy job to do, but it is the most efficient, timesaving method, and if you’re doing it yourself, it will save you money.