How to Take Up Vinyl Flooring

How to take up vinyl flooring is more about patience and studious labor than specialized skills. It's not necessarily complicated but it is time-consuming and requires a lot of hard work to get it done and the right results without causing unintentional damage. It's easy to cause damage to the subfloor when removing vinyl, usually due to the glue and tools used to pull it up. Not to mention the fact that you'll need to rent a few tools you might not be familiar with using. If you're gutting a bathroom, removing vinyl is typically a good option to complement the update.

How to Take Up Vinyl Flooring

You might be doing a rental home clean out and want to make a few updates to get it ready to show and lease or are redoing an office break room or your home kitchen. Whatever the reason, understand this won't be like taking out old carpet. Vinyl or laminate flooring isn't stretched across the floor and held in place with tacking strips as is carpet. It's typically glued directly to the subfloor. This means there will be little room for error.

Let’s be clear: It’s no fun to remove vinyl flooring. Peeling up the material itself is no picnic, but the real trial is to get rid of the glue that had been securing the vinyl to the subfloor. The only silver lining here is that while tedious and time-consuming, it’s certainly not complicated to remove vinyl flooring. No special tools or advanced skills are required. It’s really only a matter of elbow grease. --Bob Vila.com

Also, you could discover some unpleasant surprises, like what's known in the flooring industry as "pet damage." Essentially, this is a euphemism for dry, stale pet urine stains soaked into the subfloor. You can treat this with dish soap, scrub brush, and by letting bleach soak in overnight, with a fan running. Start by clearing the room out completely and then pull up all the trim. Next, remove any tacking, along with nails and staples. Then use this guide for how to take up vinyl flooring:

1. Start pulling up the vinyl in corners. The corners are where you'll have the biggest probability of getting under the vinyl first to start to pull it up away from the subfloor. Carefully pull at each corner and then take up as much as you can carefully. Watch for signs of subfloor damage as you go.
2. Scrape away adhesive. Use a floor scraper to remove the adhesive from the subfloor. Be careful not to gouge into the subfloor or to run the floor scraper into walls or cabinets. This will take a lot of patience and will be labor intensive.
3. Spread adhesive remover. To remove any adhesive that does not come up using the scraper, you'll have to soften it with adhesive remover. Follow the manufacturer's application instructions carefully
4. Clean the subfloor. Sweep the floor thoroughly and then use a shop vacuum to clean up any loose remnants. If adhesive still remains on the subfloor, you'll have to go ahead and repeat steps 3 through 5 as necessary to finish.

Once you've taken up all the vinyl flooring, phone 800-433-1094 or visit Pro Junk Dispatch and we'll come out to pick it up and haul it away along with any other junk garbage.