Can Linoleum Be Used as a Dance Floor

Vinyl floors are a wonderful way to requite a professional look and feel to your home dance studio. Vinyl gives the same smoothness as a wood floor, is easy to clean and care for, and can exist installed by DIY-ers fifty-fifty with no experience. Vinyl also dampens sound and vibration, so your downstairs neighbors won't even know that y'all are dancing!

Here, we volition hash out the best way to set up the flooring of your studio space for vinyl flooring installation. This mail service is function ane in a serial about vinyl flooring installation for domicile dance studios.

In previous posts, we accept looked at how to install a marley floor on your dance studio flooring. Marley is a wonderful fabric for ballet, jazz, and hip hop, but sometimes you want a floor that feels more than like the wood you might be dancing on in ballroom, swing, or tap. Home installation of forest floors tin can exist quite expensive and hard to do. A great budget culling is to gear up a floating vinyl floor over your existing studio flooring.

Vinyl floors tin be every bit inexpensive equally 2 or 3 dollars per square foot. Professional installation may cost simply as much in labor- hither nosotros will show y'all how to lay downward your own flooring, saving yous hundreds of dollars.

Step 0: Pull upwardly carpet from the floor

If you currently have carpet on your studio floor, you will need to rip up the carpet. If you have a linoleum, concrete, or wood floor, skip to step 1.

Rug, while comfortable for walking, can be bad for dancing. The added friction between your feet and the carpet increases the risks of twisting injuries, such every bit talocrural joint sprains or other articulatio genus issues. There'southward also the chance of carpet fire!

You aren't able to install a new vinyl flooring on height of existing carpet. Rug makes for a bumpy surface, and so your vinyl floor will not rest evenly beyond the room. Therefore, your beginning order of business is to pull up the sometime carpet. For this footstep, yous'll merely need a utility pocketknife, pliers, and a hammer.

Showtime at the corner of the room. Using your pliers, grab onto the carpet and pull away from the floor. Eventually, the carpet will pause free from the floor. Cutting the carpet from the bottom side using your utility knife into long strips.

Underneath the carpet you run across may be a squishy, composite looking material called the carpet pad. This likewise needs to be removed. The carpeting pad is unremarkably attached to the flooring by extremely sharp staples. The staples are often close to the perimeter of the pad. Employ your pliers to pull these staples upwardly. You can collect these staples and put them into a rigid container for rubber disposal.

Along the perimeter of the room is a strip of nails that is used to agree the carpeting in place. You should be particularly wary of these dangerous strips of wood. They have small nails near one inch apart pointing upward at an angle. My best advice, for your safety, is to remove these strips immediately as the carpet comes up. To do and so, look for the large nails that are used to agree the strips to the floor. With your pliers, take hold of a concord and pull upwards slowly but firmly. Once they separate from the floor, yous can either use a hammer or screwdriver to remove them completely.

To safely dispose of the carpet, cutting into strips. Wrap the nail strip inside the carpet pad and roll the carpet tightly towards one end. Using some packing tape or duct tape to keep the roll tight at the end. Carpet is deceptively heavy, and so practice not attempt to pack up the carpet from your entire room into one giant roll. Continue your strips curt, iii feet at the longest, for easy transport.

Most likely, y'all have a wooden subfloor underneath the carpet. Go along to step 1b!

Pace 1a. Installing vinyl over linoleum / vinyl

if you have a linoleum or vinyl floor, you lot're in luck: you don't need to remove it to put another floor down. In fact, information technology is preferable to put the new vinyl floating floor directly on meridian of a previous vinyl or linoleum flooring!

First of all, yous'll want to make clean the floor lightly using a standard floor cleaner. Alternatively, consider using a little flake of dish detergent in water. Just mop the flooring, and allow it to dry out fully overnight. It doesn't accept to be spotless, but you'll want to wash out the major pieces of debris and grit.

Step 1b. Installing vinyl over a wooden subfloor

The wooden subfloor is built from a thick plywood over top of the frame of the house. Because of this, at that place are nails that are used to concord the subfloor to the frame. Some of these nails may not be properly put in; these need to hammered until they are flush with the flooring. This is also a groovy chance to fix those squeaks in the floor! Tightly secure any areas that make these noises by hammering nails through the floor.

Don't apply water to clean the subfloor if it is plywood. Instead, use a store vacuum and try to suck up all the tiny pieces of debris, especially in the corners and underneath the baseboards. You'll want this to be equally free from stuff as possible when y'all put in your new floor.

If the house was congenital in the 80s or earlier, yous might exist lucky and detect that you have a hardwood floor. You lot might want to reconsider your plans to cover that flooring with vinyl: hardwood is a beautiful surface!

Step 1c. Installing vinyl over a concrete floor

Concrete is a fine surface for dancing. Afterward all, the original hip hop dancers, the B-Boys and B-Girls of New York, used concrete surfaces for years!

Simply, physical can be a very hard surface, which tin can be painful in the short term, and tin increase stress on the torso'south joints. The alternative therefore, is to put a vinyl surface on top of the physical, which tin provide a little bit of cushioning to your dance studio floor.

With concrete, you demand to exist concerned with humidity. Effort putting a two or 3 foot section of square scrap vinyl over an area of the concrete and duct record all the edges down. Get out for iii days, then pull upwards the tape. If it comes off easily, it means that the concrete has too much humidity, and your vinyl flooring may not be suited for the surface.

Step 2. Level the floor

Information technology would also be preferable that the floor is flat. In fact, well-nigh floating vinyl floors cannot be installed if at that place is more than than a 5% change in top over iii feet. Most of the time, peculiarly in newer houses built after 1990, the floor will already be level plenty to install your new dance studio floor without having to do any leveling.

Pass your level across the floor surface. Notation where the high spots and low spots are. For high spots, you lot tin can use a belt sander with medium dust sandpaper to thin the areas that are high. For safety purposes, please use a face mask or respirator with a shop vacuum to capture as much of the dust as possible.

Y'all'll too want to heighten the depression areas of the floor. You can use ready mix floor patching compound, easily available at any dwelling house improvement store like Home Depot, to heighten the dips in the floor. Use a paint stirring stick to mix it up, and use a putty knife to use the patching compound. Smooth the edges, and allow to dry as recommended - by and large less than an hour. Sand any rough edges, as you did for the elevated areas.

With these steps done, your future home dance studio flooring is prepped and ready for your new vinyl floors!

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Source: http://www.danceworkbalance.com/blog/preparing-your-home-dance-studio-for-diy-vinyl-floor-installation

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