Before laying a new carpet, hardwood, or other flooring material, you need to make sure your floor is level.

It sounds obvious, but as renovators, who are experienced in removing decades-worth of old flooring -revealing tree ring-like layers of tiles, laminates and wood -can tell you, it’s not always taken as a given.

“In a lot of the older houses we do . there might be three or four levels of old vinyl on there,” says Scott Thorvaldsen, an estimator with Contempa Carpet Co. “As long as the subfloor is pretty level, there’s no problem when we do tile and linoleum . the floor should be very secure, screwed and glued.”

If you’re planning to install any sort of hardwood or floating floor like laminate, you’ll need the floor to be as level as possible, says Thorvaldsen. “With the floating floors . if the floor (level) is out of whack, you’ll have dips in the floor,” he says.

If you’re planning to install hardwood, you need to make sure you have the proper substrate, says Ryan Dyck, operations manager with Alberta Hardwood Flooring Ltd.

“In a standard home you need to put hardwood over plywood or OSB, which is typical for a standard nail-down hardwood floor,” he says. “We don’t recommend installing over any kind of particle or shiplap.

And in older homes built in the ’60s or ’70s, they’d often use particleboard under carpeting; we don’t recommend installing over that. That wood’s old and brittle, so you put a nail into it, it may split and squeak over time.”

The most common floor-levelling issue he encounters involves the concrete base used in basements, says Thorvaldsen.

“Basement concrete has to be very level to put any floating flooring on it,” he says. “It’s more prone to not being level when they pour it; if it’s way out of whack you have to fill it in with self-levelling compounds.”

Do-it-yourselfers can buy these compounds and do the work themselves, or they can hire a company to do this sort of prep work.

Reno-Ready Floors is an example of a company that can make sure concrete floors are level and ancient layers of old flooring are removed before fresh tile or other coverings are installed.

“The tolerance for laminate flooring or engineered (hardwood) flooring is pretty strict,” says owner Joe Kubista.

“They say about a quarter inch over 10 feet is how far a floor is supposed to (deviate). Even a concrete floor poured well is out more than that.”

Kubista says having a level floor is just as important if you’re laying carpet, even though it isn’t subject to the warps, cracks and squeaking un-level tile or wood might experience. “You’ll still feel it -the waviness,” he says.

As for that chronically squeaky floor, aside from making sure subfloors are tightly nailed down, and hardwood and other materials are installed on a level surface, Dyck says improper humidity -especially in Calgary’s dry climate -can also cause hardwood floors to squeak. “To see 40 per cent humidity in a home would be great,” he says.

Article source: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Level+floors+must+when+laying+flooring/4916855/story.html