How much should I expect to invest in floor leveling before tile, laminate, hardwood, cork, bamboo or LVT is installed?

 
 

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“How much should you expect to invest in floor leveling before installing LVP, LVT, hardwood, laminate flooring, cork flooring, et cetera? With carpeting, it’s not really necessary in most cases, but it can be. We’re definitely going to give you a quote if we notice that in advance. One thing that’s very difficult to estimate is if you have carpeting down or ceramic down or something like that and you’re going to be replacing that floor or carpeting with luxury vinyl tile, luxury vinyl plank, or any other hard surface like laminate, cork, hardwood. It’s very difficult to ascertain how much leveling is going to need to be done. I can almost promise you that some will be, especially since the house has carpeting or something else. It probably wasn’t designed to be able to have hardwood floor. It probably was not pre-planned to have those other types of flooring in there. Chances are there’s a little bit of floor, maybe a little, maybe a lot of floor leveling that can be done. It needs to be done before we can put that down.

How much can be expected for an investment? We really don’t know. Once we pull it up and we start pulling out our strings and levels and straight edges, et cetera, we can give you a pretty good idea in advance before we start. The reason that we like to mention this sort of thing upfront is that we don’t want you to feel held hostage or be surprised by extra costs that are unforeseen. There are some companies out there that would rather not tell you until it’s time to get that type of work done. We’re different, we want to let you know in advance that you should expect a little bit, possibly even a lot of investment will be necessary to put those things down. The manufacturers require it, so that’s something that we just don’t. It does improve the insulation obviously, but it’s required by the manufacturer that those surfaces, those under surfaces are very flat because it improves the installation, the overall appearance of the floor, but it also helps the performance of that floor. So make sure that you talk to your estimator about how much it’s going to cost to get that done so that way you know all the details in advance.”