Forum Archive

I’ve been living in the same rental apartment for 10 years now, and when I moved in, everything was brand new. The living room and bedroom are carpeted, but as you can imagine, after 10 years the carpet needs to go. Besides the look of it, I have severe allergies and asthma (and a shedding cat). I want to convince my landlord that it’s time to change out the flooring, particularly to a solid surface floor. Because he is so nice and my rent is so low, I’d like to approach him with some super low-cost options and maybe even some options I could install myself. I’ve been looking online at vinyl planks that have the look of hardwood. Vinyl was my first choice simply because the subfloor in my apartment is EXTREMELY uneven. In the bedroom when walking towards the bed, it actually feels like you are going uphill! The living room isn’t as bad as that, but it’s definitely not level. It was my understanding that vinyl peel and stick planks can be placed on an unlevel floor without using a leveling compound (and maybe just using a self leveling underlayment.) Am I wrong? I’ve read up on a product called Novalis and it seems to get great reviews on gardenweb (picture of Novalis planks seen here – http://tinyurl.com/oodqcy). It’s cheap and would suit my purposes. My living room is about 8’10”x11’2” and the bedroom is about 9’6”x18′. So, figuring that I’d need about 280 square feet of flooring (to be safe), it will cost just over $300. Do you think that flooring would work on an uneven floor? Or will it just peel up on me? I’m super handy so I think I could install it myself. If necessary, how hard is it to level out a floor? Could I do that myself? (the subfloor appears to be plywood planks.) Is there any other super cheap product I could suggest to the landlord besides more carpet?