Hi,

I'm about to start a hardwood flooring project in my house, and there's an issue with our kitchen. It seems that the previous owner of our house changed out the vinyl flooring once and instead of actually ripping out their old vinyl and putting in a new one, they simply nailed a new plywood sheet on top and put vinyl over it. Now we're doing the whole floor in hardwood, but the kitchen has an extra sheet of plywood on top. Should I make a transition there or level the whole floor?

Some immediate issues I see with not taking out the extra plywood is that with the layer of hardwood on top, I'll need to cut off the bottom edge of all my doors leading out from the kitchen area. So my choices are to put in plywood to level the rest of the house, rip out the plywood in the kitchen, or make a transition into the rest of the house.

Thanks for any advice.

Thats how your supposed to install vinyl.

Thanks for clarifying that, but that doesn't help my situation. What should I do for my hardwood floor?

I think it's pretty simple rip out the kitchen

Is it plywood or is it underlayment? Vinyl typcially gets put in over particle board underlayment...provides a nice and smooth surface to stick the vinyl to and it brings it up to a better transition height for the surrounding flooring. Getting that underlayment up sucks! I just did mine and it was particle board that was stapled literally every few inches. You can 't pry up any decent amount since it just chips up around all the staples.

2 tricks that will save your sanity if you have underlayment to deal with:

Get out your circular saw and set it for just over the depth of the vinyl + the underlayment. Saw a grid all over the room around 12" per square. Then get out your hammer and pry bar and bust it up. It sucks and it makes a hell of a mess, but at least you can get out decent sized chunks quickly. It's way easier to haul off instead of chips. You will have a lot of staples left in the floor as well...use a good pair of dikes and roll them out. A claw puller or a pair of fencing pliers also works pretty well.

You will also have underlayment under your stove, dishwasher and possibly the cabinets. My house had a pantry upgrade put in by the builder and I found out that they just slapped it right on top of the whole thing too. Go out and buy an oscillating tool a la multimaster and a couple of extra blades. This tool will be your new best friend. You can cut out under your cabinet toekick, do your doorjambs, whack any cleats that don't set properly on your flooring and...the list continues.

Br,

John

Thanks a lot for the input. I'm pretty sure it's plywood and not underlayment. I haven't ripped out the vinyl yet, but there are places where our dog chewed through the vinyl and you can see for certain it's not particle board. The under the cabinets thing doesn't matter since we're putting in new cabinets with our new floor so we'll be ripping our old cabinets out anyway. What I really want to know is: is there any benefit to ripping it out compared to putting in plywood in the other rooms that are a sheet of plywood lower? Pretty much is it easier/better to rip out the extra layer of plywood or is it easier/better to shave an inch off the bottom of my doors?

Actually is is cheaper and easier to install plywood in the whole house or to just rip up in the kitchen?

it's cheaper to rip up the kitchen, but to put plywood in won't run me too much money to begin with.