Floor removal & demo

Tile demolition produces respirable silica dust, and left alone it finds every room in the house through the return air. Containment is not an upsell. Plastic walls with zippered openings, supply registers and returns sealed off, and grinders running HEPA shrouds with vacuum at the tool rather than a broom afterward. The alternative is a fine gray film reappearing on baseboards and ceiling fans for months afterward.

Then comes flat, and every material has a number attached to it. Large-format tile wants an eighth of an inch in ten feet. Most click-together vinyl plank asks for roughly three sixteenths in ten feet. An open-plan run from the entry through the kitchen crosses enough slab to break either figure in a house that looks level to the eye.

High spots get ground down, low spots get filled with patching compound, and where a whole room is out it gets primed and poured with a self-leveling underlayment. On a slab taking glue-down material we test moisture first, since concrete reading high will release adhesive no matter how flat the surface is.

The reason to be slow here is that haste does not show up at handover. It shows up around the twelve-month mark. Thinset ridges left in place become hollow spots that crack tile in the second year. A high spot under vinyl plank wears the print layer through in a stripe down the walkway. A dip under a click floor works the joints apart until they gap and tick underfoot. Old adhesive under new adhesive lets go quietly.

That is why this work stays with our own installers, most of whom have been with the business around twenty years, instead of going to a demolition sub whose job ends before the floor is ever laid.