Removing kitchen tile with plywood under it

ediconu

Hey everyone,

I have a question about my kitchen floor. It appears to be a sheet of linoleum with a thin piece of plywood below it (above the subfloor). It looks like they installed it this way so that it would be level with the carpet, which is now laminate. I am going to put laminate in the kitchen as well so I need to remove the tile, and I assume, this plywood.

I haven't investigated how the plywood is attached to the subfloor, or how the linoleum is attached to the plywood because I'm trying to avoid damaging the subfloor, and the only obvious option to me would be to pry up a bunch of it and take a peek.

Is there a better way to check how they're attached, or a standard method for this kind of setup, and if so, what would be the best way to get the linoleum and plywood out of the way?

I think it goes under the cabinets, which means I'll have to remove all of them too, won't I?

Thanks for any help,
Mike

shawn T

Thats called underlayment and you should be able to just pull it up. But if you dont want to rip up your cabinets, you could try scraping up the lenolium (so as not to trap moisture). Then just put in a wood threshold under the door in the bathroom to hide the height difference.

ron schenker

If you have a heat register in the floor, pull it up and you can see what kind of floors are lurking beneath.

Darylh

This is a little confusing, you mention Lino, plywood and you also mentioned tile. Do you mean you have tile on top of lino on top of plywood on top of subfloor or lino, plywood tile subfloor???

ChrWright

Are you matching floor heights then... laminate to laminate?

The underlayment is usually stapled or nailed...either way the easiest way to get it up is to use a circular saw to cut it into small sections and pull it up with a flat bar. Set the depth of the blade so that it only cuts through the linoleum and underlayment, and not the subfloor.

If the underlayment goes under the cabinets, you don't have to remove them--you have to cut it around the border of the cabinets. The hard way is to score it several times with a very sharp utility knife and then use a flat bar to pry it up and "break" along the cabinets. This will only work if it's 1/4" luan ply. Anthing thicker and you won't be able to cut it with a utility knife.

The other method would be to rent a toe-kick saw. It's a power tool that's made for exactly this circumstance. I will warn you, though, that this is a tool not for the faint of heart. If you aren't confident with power tools, you'd be better off hiring this job out. This particular saw can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, so proceed with caution/at your own risk.

__________________
Christopher Wright, WrightWorks, LLC

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