Can You Put Laminate Flooring over Tile

Laminate is one of the best floating flooring options for your home. It’s easy to install, clean, and maintain while adding value to your house. But can you put laminate over tile in the bathroom?

Yes- it’s possible to install laminate flooring over good condition tiles in your house; living room or even in the bathroom. This is because the laminate boards don’t depend on adhesion to the surface beneath them. As such, the presence of moisture on the existing ceramic tiles won’t affect their functionality.

How do you lay laminate flooring over tile?

Laminate flooring- being a floating flooring material- doesn’t need to be fastened to the subfloor. This quality makes it a great flooring renovation solution if you lack the time or energy to remove the old flooring before installing the new one and make dull laminate shine.

You can simply lay laminate floor planks over your existing hardwood, vinyl, and even tiled flooring. To properly lay laminate floorboards over your tiled flooring, follow the procedure outlined below:

1. Start off by inspecting the old tiles to ensure they’re still in good structural shape. If your tiles are cracked, chipped, or loose; you’ll be better off chipping the old tiling away and installing the laminate floor planks on a bare subfloor. However, if the tiles are still in good condition, you can proceed to lay down the laminate boards over them.
2. Next, check to ensure that the height/thickness that’ll be added by the new laminate floor planks won’t significantly minimize the height of your entryways and rooms. This is an especially-significant consideration for homes with taller people.
3. Now, level the tiled floor, just as you would an uneven subfloor. This is done to prevent future plank separation whenever one steps on the uneven tiles. Leveling is usually done using a leveling compound that fills in the troughs in the tiles and the deep grout lines; resulting in a smooth and uniform surface over which you can lay your laminate floorboards.
4. Next, you need to install an underlayment to act as a moisture barrier for your laminate flooring. While the old tiles may provide some degree of moisture protection, they’re not as effective in keeping off moisture as underlayment material. What’s more, underlayment provides heat insulation and cushioning, alongside acting as a moisture barrier. If some underlayment material was already installed with the old tiling, then you can skip this step.
5. Finish off the process by laying down your laminate floor planks over the even tile surface. When installing the laminate floorboards, ensure to stagger them for added structural strength and visual appeal. To do this, cut out the laminate floor planks at random lengths, ensuring that the end joints of planks in adjacent rows don’t coincide with each other.

Here a video on how to lay laminate or vinyl floor over tiles

Can you put floating floor over tiles?

Yes- it’s possible! Floating floors are a type of flooring material that isn’t directly glued to the subfloor, with laminate flooring and loose-lay vinyl flooring being proper examples. Floating floorboards are designed to stay in place through their tongue-and-groove or click-and-lock construction designs that facilitate interlocking between adjacent planks. Sometimes, you may wish to install such flooring over an existing tile floor due to changes in your aesthetical preferences, as well as labor and cost considerations.

Ripping off existing tiling before laying your preferred type of floating floor is a costly and labor-intensive process. As such, simply overlaying the existing tile with the floating flooring is usually a more economical and convenient alternative. The proper way to go about this is to ensure that the existing tiling isn’t loose or cracked, as either of these issues will lead to a botched installation of your floating floorboards.

What flooring can I put over laminate?

If you already have laminate flooring and want to lay another type of floor material over it for a different aesthetic appeal, you can successfully do so using ceramic tiles. Meanwhile, you’ll want to avoid laying any other type of floating flooring, like vinyl flooring, over your laminate floor boards. This is because laminate lumber is a poor subfloor material for vinyl floor boards and doing so will definitely lead to structural problems down the line.

For larger homes where the removal of the existing laminate flooring can be particularly tiring and time-consuming, you can successfully lay ceramic tiles over the laminate boards by following the steps elaborated below:

1. Sand down the surface of the old laminate flooring to ensure the tiles that are to be installed stick more easily.
2. After sanding, clean away any residual dust and debris using a broom or a vacuum cleaner. This will help you to avoid the formation of loose spots during tile installation.
3. Now, install your ceramic tiles by gluing them down to the clean, sanded, laminate surface using construction adhesive. You should press down the tiles as you lay them down to ensure they properly stick to the laminate surface beneath them.
4. Finish off by filling in the grout lines between the newly-installed pieces of ceramic tiles using thin-set concrete. You can apply the thin-set concrete using a trowel. Also, ensure to wipe off excess grout afterward using a wet piece of clothing.

Can you put peel and stick flooring over tile?

Yes, you can lay peel-and-stick tiling over various existing surfaces- including tiles. Such tile-on-tie installation- however- calls for proper preparation of the existing tiled surface. Such preparation includes cleaning the floor of any dust and debris to ensure maximum adhesion of the peel-and-stick vinyl tiles. You’ll also want to ensure that the old tile flooring is level, as the installation of peel-and-stick flooring over uneven flooring usually leads to gaps in the floor structure later on.