Plastic floor tile and also various other sorts of plastic flooring are exceptional options for renovating a kitchen area or a restroom. Vinyl flooring is economical as well as long-lasting. Its resistance to dampness is unparalleled by other types of flooring. It is simple to install by yourself, as well as you can normally have a little area finished within a day or more.
Is it possible to mount your vinyl tile and various other types of vinyl flooring straight on top of an existing floor? As with numerous other renovating projects, preparation is a major part of the job. With flooring installment, preparing the correct base– or substratum– is essential for a durable, lovely floor. It is a lot more vital with slim flooring such as vinyl flooring.
Mount Vinyl Tile Over These Floorings
With the appropriate substrate, you can install vinyl flooring over:
Concrete flooring
Laminate flooring
Vinyl flooring
Solid hardwood flooring
Engineered wood flooring
Ceramic or rock ceramic tile
Popular Plastic Reflooring Projects
Vinyl Flooring Over Timber Flooring
Strong hardwood or engineered timber flooring might serve as bases for vinyl flooring. If the wood is heavily gapped, these gaps should first be taken care of. Old solid hardwood can mug or swell over time, as well. This condition would make a straight setup over the timber challenging. Timber flooring of this type would need a stepping in the underlayment.
Plastic Flooring Over Laminate Flooring
The laminate floor may act as a substrate for plastic flooring. Like strong timber flooring, laminate can swell when based on water. It may be needed to fix high-moisture locations initially: around the dishwasher, sink, as well as refrigerator.
Plastic Flooring Over Ceramic Tile
Vinyl flooring can be set up straight over ceramic as well as porcelain floor tile flooring. Cracked or missing out on tiles must be taken care of or filled in. Wide joints between the floor tiles can create small anxieties in the vinyl flooring. If the floor tile flooring has wide or deep joints, make use of an underlayment instead of mounting the plastic straight on the floor tile.
Criteria for Correct Plastic Flooring Substrate
In most cases, you can set up vinyl flooring in addition to the existing flooring. Typically, there is absolutely nothing integral concerning the reduced floor covering’s a product that averts it from functioning as a substratum for the top vinyl flooring. As long as that lower floor covering has every one of the characteristics of an appropriate substrate, it can be used.
Bear in mind that plastic flooring is slim, soft, and also adaptable. Vinyl flooring can not efficiently bridge over or smooth out substrate blemishes in the way that thicker, inflexible floor coverings can. Strong hardwood or engineered timber, for instance, can bridge gaps, holes, and seams, as well as smooth over surface embossing. With vinyl flooring, any type of one of those flaws could transfer, or telegraph, to the vinyl flooring above. Also even worse, huge holes might cause parts of the vinyl flooring to form craters with time.
Usually, a substrate of large-format boards, such as 1/4-inch thick, 4-foot by 8-foot plywood or MDF fragment board sheets, is used as an underlayment prior to the plastic flooring is set up. This substratum is an enhancement to the subfloor. Large-format underlayment sheets function well for vinyl flooring due to the fact that they include some strength, have few seams, and bridge over tiny holes as well as surface area embossing.
Durable and Solid
Getting rid of floor coverings assists the installer to evaluate the condition of the subfloor. By not removing the existing floor covering, it is challenging to see if the subfloor is split, deteriorated, or otherwise is not in good condition. See to it that the existing floor covering and the subfloor and also any kind of feasible underlayment are sturdy enough for the installment of the plastic flooring.
Seamless or Snugly Seamed
Large-format boards give a setup surface area that has a couple of seams. In a kitchen flooring that is 16 feet long by 12 feet wide, for instance, six underlayment boards would be used, leading to just a few seams. By comparison, a solid wood flooring used as a substratum may have numerous joints. If that hardwood flooring has other problems, such as large gaps in between the floorboards (commonly the outcome of water damage), it would be unsuitable as a substrate for the plastic flooring.
No Holes or Various Other Imperfections
High spots in the substrate should be fined sand down and also low spots must be filled. While small blemishes could not immediately transfer to the plastic flooring surface area, gradually they may subject themselves in the form of reduced craters or hillsides that slowly base on the surface.
Little or No Embossing
One of the desired visual high qualities of some ceramic tile, laminate, as well as vinyl is surface embossing. Embossing gives minor low and high that help makes the floor covering look extra realistic (like the material they are imitating, such as wood) or simply to help their appearance.
Obvious embossing can ultimately telegram to the surface area of the vinyl flooring. While this generally does not put on thicker (6.5 mm) vinyl flooring, this might be the case with thinner boards in the 3.5 mm or much less array.
Dry
Catching moisture in between plastic flooring and also its substrate might develop mold as well as mildew gave that the wetness has no method of escape. Freshly poured concrete flooring needs to fully heal and dry out before vinyl flooring is laid on top.
Acceptable Height
Whenever including one flooring on top of one more flooring, elevation ends up being a problem. If the previous version was presumably an appropriate height, will the higher variation be too high? Using plastic flooring as a top layer is among the much better selections in this respect considering that it includes much less elevation than various other sorts of flooring.