DIY Network

I am new to the forum so any help would be greatly appreciated.

I just purchased my first home and am trying to do some renovations. (It was a bit of a fixer upper).

It had old nasty carpet and even nastier laminate flooring in the bathroom and kitchen. We had no issue removing the carpet and carpet tacks. However, the laminate flooring will not come up on the edges where it has been glued down. When I do get it up, it is pulling up part of the wooden sub-floor with it.

So I guess I have a two part question. If i am putting tile down in the bathroom, and hardwood down everywhere else, is it 100% necessary to get all the laminate up off the flooring to lay tile in the bathroom and hardwood in the living room/kitchen? (It is very thin and obviously solidly in place).

If I do have to get it all up, how on earth do i get it up without tearing up the subfloor? Because it seems that the chunky subfloor would be no different than the small chunks of laminate?

Thanks for all your help!

Do you mean vinyl tile or ceramic tile in the bathroom? Taking out the laminate is probably the best way to go. Since you will be in a "No Turn Back," situation, go ahead and rip the laminate out. For ceramic tile you'll be putting cement board down and for vinyl tile you'll want to put down new luan underlayment to get a smooth base. Any damage to the partical board or OSB board will be smoothed out by the new underlayment. Wood putty is a good leveler except that if the hole is very large you'll have to do the repair in steps because the wood putty shrinks when put in holes in large amounts.

I have been trying to rip out the vinyl flooring so we can put in ceramic tile. It seems to be impossible to take up the existing vinyl flooring without ripping up pieces of the sub floor.

If we need to put down cement board to install ceramic tile, why would we need to rip up all the vinyl? Any advice on how to get it up? It is currently glued directly to the plywood, and really doesn't budge.

Welcome to the real work of home repair. The sub floor always gets torn up when trying to do ths job. Yes it all needs to come out. Use a 4" wide razer floor scrapper and hold it at a steep angle to reduce the digging in.
Any viods will need to be filled with non gypsom floor leveler not wood filler. Wood putty will just chrumble up and shrick in the void.
If you thinking of putting in tile then there's far more to it then just slapping it down. You need to make sure the the spans not to long, the floor joist are wide enough and the floor joist are not to far apart before any tiling.
Tile can have no flex under it or it will just fail.
No amount of tile board is going to stop any flexing.
And lauon is no long excepted as underlayment for tile or sheet flooring. Glue bond relieceing, and color bleed through are the reasons why.