Hopefully, we are different than "Patio Man", but Heather and I had been considering doing something with our old linoleum kitchen floor, as it seemed impossible to clean. Last week I was in Busy Beaver and saw wood laminate floors on sale, so I decided to get some. It ended up being a little more than I thought originally, but still reasonably cheap, as far as flooring goes.
We were going to tear up the original linoleum, but they did a good job gluing it down, and there is a layer of linoleum below that one, so it would have been a lot of work to remove the 4 layers (2 of linoleum, each with a thin plywood layer). So we decided to just put the laminate on top of the linoleum.
There were a couple spots that were not level, so I originally thought I could just put down some boards, and spackling around them to make it close enough for the laminate to lie flat. But, after we got started, we found out that the 1/8" maximum abberation required by the laminate is really small. I found some self-leveling concrete/cement, and that worked wonderfully. The hardest part was mixing the powder and water together. Then I poured it on the floor, and spread it around a little, mostly, it settled into the right places by itself. The leveling process took a couple of days, because I had to let stuff dry as I went along.
The hardest part of the wood laminate is getting the edges measured right, and cutting the boards to fit the irregular shapes. Cutting and placing the laminate sections took somewhere around 8 hours, with Heather helping at the end.
We have pictures of the process.
Posted by Jon Daley on August 2, 2004, 6:43 am | Read 2749 times
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