Best Laminate Flooring Underlayment

Best Laminate Flooring Underlayment

The main reason for using underlayment, is that in a real life situation and not in a testing situation, is to cushion the floor somewhat and to reduce noise. A floating floor is not glued or screwed and so it bounces. As you move the flooring pushes down to the sub-floor and clicks. The underlayment prevents this from happening. When you start a home renovation project you want the work to look it's best, that means paying particular detail to how you install the the subfloor over which the laminate will be laid. What our for spaces and bubbles, particularly the nails and screws that you use to affix the subfloor to the concrete base. 


Combo Foam and Film Underlayment


The best under-layment for concrete slab you want to use a "combo" foam/ film underlayment this will give you the vapor barrier you need at a reasonable cost. The reason you would want a vapor and water barrier is so that if your slab ever cracked, any water vapor that came up through the crack would be forced to the edge of the flooring and not allowed to come up into your flooring and ruin it at the center of the room. It's still possible that the slab will end up cracked, could be during construction or maybe later on, when doing replacement work. 

 And if it doesn't crack it has an expansion joint in it which is basically a controlled crack. Another source of vapor would be from condensation during your heating season, your warm, moist air going up against the relatively cool perimeter of your slab will cause condensation to form, the vapor barrier isolates your flooring from this, not allowing it to absorb it and swell). Another option is to use cork, this works well especially if you have differences in height, say, matching up to tile. The cork will be very expensive compared to the foam,but longer lasting and as I said works for height diffs. For the foam, the the more uneven the floor, the thicker the foam you will want.


Linoleum Underlayment 

Another underlayment option is linoleum if the laminate goes down with nails or staples you can adhere the laminate flooring right to the linoleum underlayment. If the linoleum is in bad shape but stuck in tight in most spots you can use luan flooring boards. They also go down with staples or nails and you place them securly. Then your underlayment is set and you can install the laminate flooring. If it has been a while that the linoleum has been there, either method might cause you some trouble.