Home Flooring Guide

Laminate flooring can be installed by gluing the planks together or fitting them side by side like jigsaw puzzle. The process of removing it depends on the kind of laminate flooring you have. Below are some of the options you can take to remove your old laminate flooring:

Glued laminate flooring is not adhered directly to the floor. It is actually made up of planks that are glued together side by side, so removing old glued laminate flooring is easy. All you have to do is pull up the planks from the floor. However, if the adhesive between individual planks had seeped into the base concrete of the floor, then it can be difficult to remove. If this happens all across the floor, then removing the individual planks is going to be taxing and tedious.

At this point, you have several options on how to remove your glued laminate flooring. The first option is to melt down the glue with a heat gun. This is your only option if you want to preserve the integrity of the flooring material. You need the help of a contractor with this option. To remove the flooring, the contractor would gently pull on the floor edge until a part of it comes away from the base concrete. The contractor would then use a heat gun that applies around 300 BTUs of heat to melt the adhesive stuck to the concrete. The contractor would continue to alternately melt the glue and pull up the flooring until the entire floor is removed.

The second option is to use a motorized floor stripper. You can rent a motorized cart with claws to pull up the glued laminate flooring. This option is faster than using a heat gun, but you would not be able to use the flooring once it has been removed. Also, be prepared to spend more because renting a motorized floor stripper is very expensive.

The third option is to pull up the flooring by hand using a manual scraper to pull away at the adhesive. This is cheaper than using a motorized floor stripper and more energy efficient than a heat gun. However, this is the slowest and most tiring way to remove a glued laminate floor.

Floating laminate flooring is installed on the floor with no adhesive. Installing them is like assembling a large jigsaw puzzle as each piece fits snugly to the next. Rubberized seam sealant is used along the floor edges of the walls, lintel posts, and doorways to prevent the whole flooring from coming apart or getting pulled out. To remove floating laminate flooring, all you have to do is melt the sealant with a heat gun and remove the flooring one piece at a time. A motorized floor stripper can also be used to remove floating laminate, but it is not really necessary.