LVP Flooring Install: Prep work

This summer while I was away for a wedding (and hiking) in Colorado, our Bernese Mountain Dog decided to have diarrhea in our house. My wife woke up from the smell and cleaned it up, but missed that she had also gone in the boys' playroom which had carpet in it. Nasty. The carpet wasn't great in the first place as the room had originally been an artist's studio, plus they had cats, and so Joanna called me and asked if I thought it would be tough to rip up and install laminate flooring.

I figured it wouldn't be as easy we thought, so thankfully she waited until I got back, and we ripped the carpet out in less than an hour. If you've never done it before, once you remove the trim gently with a pry bar, you really just need to grab the carpet in a corner and pull hard. Under the carpet is a foam pad that you rip out and then pull out the staples. With that out, you'll see the nailing strips along the walls that you have to be careful of. Pry those out and remove the staples. We also have some weird ledges above the basement stairs which also give access to our attic and they had carpet on them too, so those came out and a lot of staples along the way. I have a nice magnetic roller that makes it nice to find all the staples, and my boys love to use it.

At this point we realized that the plywood flooring of the playroom was about 1 inch below the tile of our entryway. That should have been clearer sooner, but it meant we couldn't immediately put down flooring. Also, the floor was nowhere near flat in many different areas. So I needed to raise the floor and level it at the same time.

I did a lot of research about pouring floor leveling compound down, but for the most part it seems to be something you use below tile. I thought about putting it below the plywood I'd use to raise the floor, or on top of it, but in both cases, I was worried it might crack where it got thin or where I'd screw in the plywood and then I'd hear crunching in the floor every time I walked on it. Looking back, I still kind of wish we had tried the floor leveling, but all the people I talked to were not very helpful with my problem.

So I used a level, found all the low areas, made some shims and both glued and screwed down some thick 3/4 tongue and groove plywood. Using the glue definitely helps reduce any creaking or movement in the plywood. These are bigger than your normal caulk tubes, and the first tube exploded from the caulk all over my new cheapo caulk gun, so I got my money back. This Husky was much better anyways. I think we needed a full 3 tubes for about 160 square feet.

With no flooring in, we then decided if there ever was a good time to re-paint the walls, now was it. I'm pretty particular about how walls should be painted, but the main thing for me is that a lot of scraping and spackling needs to be done first. The previous owners of our house felt that there was no problem putting as many holes in a wall as needed, so we had a lot of places to work on. Of course, our kids wanted to help so that may or may not have slowed us down, but they had fun. To really get any work done, we worked many nights doing the spackle, trim, cutting and rolling after they went to bed. We picked out a great color that matched the flooring we had picked out (more to come) but it turned out to be so dark, Joanna picked up another color and we painted again.

The best part was, the final color turned out very close to our starting color. Oh well, at least the holes were fixed..