Kitchen Remodeling 101

How To Pull Up Laminate Tile In Your Kitchen

One of the biggest headaches we hear about from homeowners looking at kitchen remodeling is the need to tear out and replace laminate tiles. While tearing out your kitchen floors might seem like an extraordinary effort, the actual work involved probably isn’t as complicated as you think. We’re not saying its easy – just that a little bit of pre-planning and the use of certain tools can make the job relatively straightforward.

Since the 1970s laminate tiles have been filling up kitchen flooring everywhere. While it tends to wear well over time, there is a point of diminishing returns. Even the best laminate tile will start to fade after 30 years, which forces homeowners to replace the existing laminate with new laminate, or completely redo the floor with another material entirely. In either case, the existing flooring will need to be removed.

Keep in mind, flooring can be a lot heavier than it looks. If you’re determined to do this yourself, we recommend getting your own crew of friends to help, and to rent a dumpster to throw all of the removed laminate into after you’ve stripped it.

Make sure to compare prices between potential waste removal companies beforehand so you know where to stack the waste as you rip it out.

What type of laminate flooring do you have?

Before you start hacking your kitchen floor, take a few moments to find out what specific laminate you’re using. The two most common types of laminate for kitchen floors are glued and floating.

If you have an older kitchen that hasn’t been renovated for decades, chances are very good your laminate is of the glued variety. As is probably obvious, this sort of laminate is glued together and, unfortunately, cannot be reused. The upside of this is that you don’t have to be careful while ripping this sort of flooring up. So if you find your laminate flooring is glued, there’s no reason to be careful about how you pull it out of your kitchen.

If you have a newer kitchen built after the year 2000, you very well might have floating laminate. This sort of laminate isn’t actually attached to the subfloor – it’s “floating” on top of the subfloor (usually on top of a layer of foam).

Floating laminate pieces are made to fit together like a puzzle. To pull this sort of flooring out, you’ll need to go slowly. Find the edge and pop out one flooring panel, which will make the rest of the flooring easier to extract. You CAN reuse floating laminate, so if the tiling itself is in decent shape, we recommend setting it aside for a future project.

We install tile flooring, wood flooring, engineered wood flooring, engineered vinyl flooring, and hardwood steps. Our hardwood steps will be stained to match new flooring or existing flooring.

We also install new banisters and railings stained to match.

Job includes: tearing out existing flooring, hauling away debris, and installing new flooring. All backed by our five-year workmanship warranty and the flooring manufacturer warranty.

So we have a lot of experience using a lot of different materials. We’re more than happy to install anything you’d like. But if you love the look and feel of hardwood but hate the upkeep, you owe it to yourself to let us introduce you to COREtec.

You can learn more about your options and schedule your free consultation at claytonhoover.com/flooring.