If you don’t peel, it won’t stick!

I was called to a client’s home a couple of weeks ago to replace the flooring in their downstairs washroom. The subfloor has rotted underneath and needed to be replaced, along with the flooring on top. It should have been a pretty standard job.

The first step was pulling up the existing flooring to get at the subfloor underneath. The existing flooring was a basic peel & stick tile, which is usually a nightmare to lift. The adhesive is so strong that the tiles typically chip off in very small pieces and it takes much longer than some other types of flooring. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

To my surprise, the first few tiles lifted off easily. More specifically, each tile came up in one piece! The next row came off just as easily. I couldn’t believe my luck! The next row came off just as easily. That’s when I got suspicious. Why were they coming off so easily? I grabbed the closest tile out of the discard pile and looked a little closer, and that’s when I saw it.

These were “peel and stick” tiles. Each tile comes with an adhesive glue, protected by a wax paper strip. You peel the strip, and stick the tile (just as the name suggests). But there was something funny about these ones. The tiles I was lifting still had a wax sheet on the underside. I peeled away the corner of the paper and, sure enough, the sticky glue was untouched underneath.

This floor had been installed by hired contractors who had forgotten the ‘peel’ part of ‘peel & stick’. The tiles were floating on top of the subfloor, held down only by the moisture in the rotting plywood.

We removed the remaining tiles, pulled up the rotted plywood, and replaced a few of the floor joists (which had also begun to rot). We installed a new subfloor and topped it with high quality, cushioned vinyl flooring. The result was beautiful, durable, and installed correctly!