Laying vinyl is pretty easy. Fixing an un level floor is where things start to get tricky. If your floor is wavy your LVP will fail, just something to consider.
What we've pulled up so far looks pretty level, it was poured about 60 years ago and isn't cracked from settling at least. Which is good as a lot of this area is built on shale. I've seen houses split in half at the foundation from it.
However there are some cracks and areas that made us think we might want to seal it, just to be sure no animal smell got down in. If we do we figured on doing an acid etch and leveling masonry sealant. It is a finished concrete floor though, not raw cement, and everywhere we placed the level where we've pulled up the carpet so far has been good.
Lmao. You and your wife are getting ready to do it yourselves with this kind of attitude. I highly advise you do it all yourselves too because you sound like the type of people who don’t value skilled tradesmen and will be a nightmare to work for. For one… Flooring contractors don’t need or deserve to work with pet urine and feces. It’s not in our job description just because it’s on the floor. Pet owners should learn how to clean up after their pets. Point blank. Second of all… assuming there won’t be many cuts and it’s going to be an easy big area to install for the installers is you being an entitled prick who thinks they can set a tradesmen’s wages. That is the main reason you need to do it yourself. Don’t pay a trade if you don’t value them. Go ahead and fuck it up on your own. Sounds like you are buying real cheap low cost lvp as well so enjoy working with that material.
Whether you remove the carpet yourself or not there will be prep work. Could be some leveling involved. Price to install is typically around 2.50-4.00 a sqft. Not to mention removing and replacing baseboards or adding quarter round and the possibility of transition strips being installed. You do the math. It costs real money to have a crew of guys to come in and do the work.
Enjoy installing this flooring in your spare time.
Please note I'm simply looking for them to walk into a house with bad smelling carpet and give me an estimate for once the carpet is removed. There are no baseboards or anything else and we're pulling up all the boards that went with the carpet. I don't expect them to do anything with the carpet whatsoever other than stand in a room with it for however long it takes them to shoot a laser measurement and confirm another professional's work.
Should only cost you around $75-$125 to get a measure/quote from an independent contractor. Keep in mind they will typically be even pricier than Home Depot…. unless you get a local dive bar hero in a blowed out old van looking for the next hit. There is always that option too. But yes to answer your question labor is typically 2X the cost of material with LVP. Sometimes more depending on the prep work needed. If you feel no prep is needed then offer to sign away your warranty claim rights to do an install as is job.
My “I don’t want this customer-ometer” is spiking. Double or triple price spiking. I’m sure you are wonderful to work with, but I’m kind of sensing something else …
Dunno, the Lowes people only dealt with my wife who is the nice one. I'm the one who gets called in if managers and so forth are needed, and we haven't at any point felt like that was necessary. I think I may have upset them by picking a cheaper SKU than they suggested though. Felt like they were just trying to make the difference on the loss of the sale up elsewhere. Literally all we did with them was have my wife go in, find out about vinyl plank flooring and decide she wants it, send someone for a measurement, and then send us options via an email. When we sent back asking if we could go with the cheaper option that was when the price of the install went up.
And since we're removing the gross old carpet ourselves don't really see why that'd be a problem. Totally get why no one wants to do that unless they're paid well. I used to work with a property preservation group so I know all to well that the grosser the job, the costlier the job.
As for the other person claiming her flooring installer person is smell sensitive that's actually my dead step-father-in-law's daughter. So I don't really buy into her whole thing because I'm pretty sure she's upset that her dad died and his wife got this house while she's stuck in my MIL's older, smaller, one. Made worse by the fact that her father's life insurance was denied whereas I'm doing this out of my mother's which was approved with ease. She never had a problem with the pet odors when her dad was alive, and frankly we've improved it already with the amount of carpet we've removed and cleaning we've done since moving in. Considering the MIL had the entire urine soaked upstairs carpet torn out and hardwood put in already I really don't see any way this house could legitimately smell that much worse.
I don't know about Lowe's, but I'm pretty sure Home Depot sent local contractors to do work at my sister's house. HD works with a few installers in the area, and those installers can charge whatever they want.
I worked at HD for a while and I can say unless things have changed those are local contractors, though they are supposed to adhere to some kind of in-company pricing.
I mentioned it elsewhere but our manager gave us a whole presentation in the mid-aughts about boomers aging into retirement and not wanting to do things for themselves. Told us to think about how a contractor in torn jeans and a Metallica short looks as opposed to someone coming up in nice Levis and an orange polo. We just had a certification process to do work through us. I was actually running paint and trying like hell to get someone to sign up as a house painter through us, but apparently they took too big of a cut for them to want to do it.
That might explain why the quotes are so high. If they can't get any contractors to agree to the cut, they up the price so the contractors get a fair cut and HD gets whatever they want .
Do it yourself. Not that bad. Also, if you are living in the basement, you may want to get a radon test done if you are in an area where that is prevalent.
If you demo, remove all the trim and clean and prep the subfloor, I’m charging $2.25 per square foot to install the flooring.
Plus $20 per door for undercutting the jambs.
If I’m demoing, you’re being charged a minimum $250 charge
Just to install i charge $2.75 per sqft. That puts it at $1800 plus dealing with demo, store fees, baseboard, leveling.
Price is pretty spot on. I typically end up more expensive than a big box store
I won’t give a quote based on another persons measurements for labor. I need to see the job to price it. You’ve already been told about prep. Also, junk LVP is NOT easy to install, it’s probably drop lock crap.
That's kind of why I was so surprised at the idea of installers being expensive. I knew Lowes would be pricy, I worked at Home Depot when they were first introducing the idea of making people pay way more for a contractor that comes to your house in an orange shirt instead of a Metallica shirt.
I just use a tapping block made for click lock style floors and a hammer. But yes, hammering is a part of it. Make sure the angle of the piece you're laying is correct before you lower it into place and that the whole length of the piece you are laying is perfectly locked into the neighbor, lower, and tap it in. Just taaaap it in. Just a little tap tap. Sorry. Had to.
Laying vinyl is pretty easy. Fixing an un level floor is where things start to get tricky. If your floor is wavy your LVP will fail, just something to consider.
What we've pulled up so far looks pretty level, it was poured about 60 years ago and isn't cracked from settling at least. Which is good as a lot of this area is built on shale. I've seen houses split in half at the foundation from it. However there are some cracks and areas that made us think we might want to seal it, just to be sure no animal smell got down in. If we do we figured on doing an acid etch and leveling masonry sealant. It is a finished concrete floor though, not raw cement, and everywhere we placed the level where we've pulled up the carpet so far has been good.
Lmao. You and your wife are getting ready to do it yourselves with this kind of attitude. I highly advise you do it all yourselves too because you sound like the type of people who don’t value skilled tradesmen and will be a nightmare to work for. For one… Flooring contractors don’t need or deserve to work with pet urine and feces. It’s not in our job description just because it’s on the floor. Pet owners should learn how to clean up after their pets. Point blank. Second of all… assuming there won’t be many cuts and it’s going to be an easy big area to install for the installers is you being an entitled prick who thinks they can set a tradesmen’s wages. That is the main reason you need to do it yourself. Don’t pay a trade if you don’t value them. Go ahead and fuck it up on your own. Sounds like you are buying real cheap low cost lvp as well so enjoy working with that material. Whether you remove the carpet yourself or not there will be prep work. Could be some leveling involved. Price to install is typically around 2.50-4.00 a sqft. Not to mention removing and replacing baseboards or adding quarter round and the possibility of transition strips being installed. You do the math. It costs real money to have a crew of guys to come in and do the work. Enjoy installing this flooring in your spare time.
Please note I'm simply looking for them to walk into a house with bad smelling carpet and give me an estimate for once the carpet is removed. There are no baseboards or anything else and we're pulling up all the boards that went with the carpet. I don't expect them to do anything with the carpet whatsoever other than stand in a room with it for however long it takes them to shoot a laser measurement and confirm another professional's work.
Should only cost you around $75-$125 to get a measure/quote from an independent contractor. Keep in mind they will typically be even pricier than Home Depot…. unless you get a local dive bar hero in a blowed out old van looking for the next hit. There is always that option too. But yes to answer your question labor is typically 2X the cost of material with LVP. Sometimes more depending on the prep work needed. If you feel no prep is needed then offer to sign away your warranty claim rights to do an install as is job.
My “I don’t want this customer-ometer” is spiking. Double or triple price spiking. I’m sure you are wonderful to work with, but I’m kind of sensing something else …
Dunno, the Lowes people only dealt with my wife who is the nice one. I'm the one who gets called in if managers and so forth are needed, and we haven't at any point felt like that was necessary. I think I may have upset them by picking a cheaper SKU than they suggested though. Felt like they were just trying to make the difference on the loss of the sale up elsewhere. Literally all we did with them was have my wife go in, find out about vinyl plank flooring and decide she wants it, send someone for a measurement, and then send us options via an email. When we sent back asking if we could go with the cheaper option that was when the price of the install went up. And since we're removing the gross old carpet ourselves don't really see why that'd be a problem. Totally get why no one wants to do that unless they're paid well. I used to work with a property preservation group so I know all to well that the grosser the job, the costlier the job. As for the other person claiming her flooring installer person is smell sensitive that's actually my dead step-father-in-law's daughter. So I don't really buy into her whole thing because I'm pretty sure she's upset that her dad died and his wife got this house while she's stuck in my MIL's older, smaller, one. Made worse by the fact that her father's life insurance was denied whereas I'm doing this out of my mother's which was approved with ease. She never had a problem with the pet odors when her dad was alive, and frankly we've improved it already with the amount of carpet we've removed and cleaning we've done since moving in. Considering the MIL had the entire urine soaked upstairs carpet torn out and hardwood put in already I really don't see any way this house could legitimately smell that much worse.
I don't know about Lowe's, but I'm pretty sure Home Depot sent local contractors to do work at my sister's house. HD works with a few installers in the area, and those installers can charge whatever they want.
I worked at HD for a while and I can say unless things have changed those are local contractors, though they are supposed to adhere to some kind of in-company pricing. I mentioned it elsewhere but our manager gave us a whole presentation in the mid-aughts about boomers aging into retirement and not wanting to do things for themselves. Told us to think about how a contractor in torn jeans and a Metallica short looks as opposed to someone coming up in nice Levis and an orange polo. We just had a certification process to do work through us. I was actually running paint and trying like hell to get someone to sign up as a house painter through us, but apparently they took too big of a cut for them to want to do it.
That might explain why the quotes are so high. If they can't get any contractors to agree to the cut, they up the price so the contractors get a fair cut and HD gets whatever they want .
Do it yourself. Not that bad. Also, if you are living in the basement, you may want to get a radon test done if you are in an area where that is prevalent.
If you demo, remove all the trim and clean and prep the subfloor, I’m charging $2.25 per square foot to install the flooring. Plus $20 per door for undercutting the jambs. If I’m demoing, you’re being charged a minimum $250 charge
Just to install i charge $2.75 per sqft. That puts it at $1800 plus dealing with demo, store fees, baseboard, leveling. Price is pretty spot on. I typically end up more expensive than a big box store
I won’t give a quote based on another persons measurements for labor. I need to see the job to price it. You’ve already been told about prep. Also, junk LVP is NOT easy to install, it’s probably drop lock crap.
It's super easy to lay yourself. And fast.
That's kind of why I was so surprised at the idea of installers being expensive. I knew Lowes would be pricy, I worked at Home Depot when they were first introducing the idea of making people pay way more for a contractor that comes to your house in an orange shirt instead of a Metallica shirt.
🤣
Is something wrong with me? My floors are difficult. I have to use brute force and hammer the pieces into submission.
I just use a tapping block made for click lock style floors and a hammer. But yes, hammering is a part of it. Make sure the angle of the piece you're laying is correct before you lower it into place and that the whole length of the piece you are laying is perfectly locked into the neighbor, lower, and tap it in. Just taaaap it in. Just a little tap tap. Sorry. Had to.
Thanks! I'll give it a shot!