# Flooring Repair and Replacement for Laguna Niguel owners Flooring replacement runs $750 to $9,500 and six to forty hours. The covering is the small part. What decides the number is everything that has to come out first and what condition the subfloor is in once it is visible. Vinyl plank, sheet goods and carpet each behave differently in a slide room. ## Everything that has to come out before the floor does The floor sits under everything, which is the whole cost story. Furniture out. Dinette pedestals unbolted from the floor plate. Bed platform out or lifted. The Thetford or Dometic toilet pulled at the flange and the flange capped, because a floor cannot go under a toilet that is still bolted down and a flange reused after a floor height change leaks. Slide room trim and transition strips off. Kitchen and bath toe kicks off. Where cabinets sit on the flooring rather than on the subfloor, the cabinets come out too, and that one detail can double the hours. Reassembly is the mirror image plus the items that do not go back the way they came off. A toilet gets a new flange seal and often a spacer suited to the new floor thickness. Slide seals get checked against the new floor height before the room travels. Transition strips are usually replaced rather than reused, since the old ones were cut to the old thickness. Anything found under the floor, a rodent entry, an unsupported water line, a duct that was never connected, gets reported with a photograph whether or not it was part of the job. - Dinette pedestals and bed platforms unbolted, hardware bagged and labelled - Toilet pulled at the flange, flange capped, new seal at reassembly - Slide room trim, transitions and toe kicks removed rather than cut around - Cabinet bases checked for whether they sit on subfloor or on covering - New floor thickness verified against slide seal contact before covering goes down ## Subfloor condition is the whole variable Two identical looking coaches with identical square footage can sit at opposite ends of this band, and the reason is always what the subfloor turns out to be. A sound subfloor means prep, underlayment where needed, and covering. A subfloor with delaminated areas at the slide sill and soft ply at the bath means cutting back to sound material, splicing in new panel with proper support under every joint, and dealing with whatever let the water in before any of that happens. Flooring with subfloor work runs $500 to $8,500 and four to thirty five hours. So we survey with a meter before quoting rather than after, and a flooring estimate written from a photograph is worth roughly what it cost to produce. A pad probe across the whole floor with pin readings at the suspect points takes under an hour and moves the estimate from a guess to a number. Where an owner declines the survey and wants a covering only price, we write it with the subfloor explicitly excluded and we say in plain language that the exclusion is the most likely supplement on the job. ## Vinyl plank, sheet goods and carpet in a slide room Vinyl plank is what most owners want and it is usually right, with one caveat that matters in a coach. A click together floating plank floor needs perimeter room to move and it does not love the flex of a slide room deck. Glue down plank, or properly adhered sheet vinyl, is the better answer inside a slide, where the deck moves every time the room travels and the floor lives under a seal that has to wipe across it. Sheet vinyl also has no seams to open, which keeps it right in a bath and around a toilet flange. Carpet has one place left in a modern coach, which is a bedroom slide where sound and warmth matter and nothing gets spilled. Everywhere else it holds coastal humidity, holds dog hair, and hides the early evidence of a slide seal leak that a hard surface would have shown as a stain inside a week. Where an owner wants carpet in a living area anyway, we recommend a hard surface with a removable rug over it, which costs less and lets a leak announce itself while it is still cheap. - Glue down plank or adhered sheet vinyl inside slide rooms - Sheet vinyl in the bath, seamless around the toilet flange - Floating plank only in main floor areas with a proper perimeter gap - Carpet limited to a bedroom slide, or replaced by a removable rug ## The threshold where a slide room meets the main floor A slide room floor and a main floor are two decks at two slightly different heights, and where they meet there is a transition doing two jobs. It has to be walkable, and it has to let the slide seal wipe across it without catching. Add three millimetres of thickness on the wrong side of that line and the room either drags the seal, rolls it under, or stops short of closing. Adding thickness under the slide room floor is worse, because the room then rides high in its opening and loads the mechanism unevenly across its travel. So the transition is planned before material is ordered rather than fitted at the end. We measure existing heights, work out the new build up on each side, and where the numbers do not work we change the material instead of the seal. On a coach running a Schwintek or a Lippert In-Wall system, where the room is carried at its sides rather than underneath, tolerance at the sill is tighter still and there is very little left to give before the drive teeth start complaining about it. ## Expansion gaps in a box that twists A house floor gets installed in a building that does not move. A coach floor gets installed in a box that twists on every driveway apron and cycles through a wide temperature swing whenever a closed unit sits in the sun. Floating floors get a perimeter gap for that, hidden under trim and toe kicks, and a plank floor installed hard against the walls will buckle at a seam or push a trim piece off the wall. Glue down material has its own version of the problem, which is an adhesive that has to stay flexible at temperature instead of going brittle. Long unbroken runs need planning too. A forty foot coach with one continuous plank run from the front cap through to the bedroom moves more than the gap at each end can absorb, so we break the run at a doorway or a threshold where a trim piece covers the movement. Owners sometimes want no transitions anywhere, one surface end to end, and that is where we explain the trade rather than build something certain to telegraph a buckle in the first hot month of storage. ## Weight per square foot on a trailer floor Flooring is sold by the square foot and it weighs by the square foot, which matters far more on a trailer than in a house. Tile plus the mortar bed and backer needed to stop it cracking in a flexing box is the heaviest option by a wide margin, and on a travel trailer or a single axle unit it is usually the option we talk an owner out of. Vinyl plank is modest. Sheet vinyl is lightest. Across the whole floor of a large fifth wheel, the gap between the lightest and heaviest choice is not trivial. Where a unit already runs near its plate, flooring is one of the few places to give weight back without surrendering anything the owner cares about. We keep the number for the specification we quote, and we will say plainly when a material request pushes a trailer past what its axles are rated to carry. Tile in a coach also cracks eventually, at the point where the floor flexes hardest, which is normally the slide sill, and a cracked tile floor is a replacement rather than a repair. ## Emptying the coach before the appointment Arrive with the coach empty and the tanks dumped. Every cabinet, every drawer, every under bench compartment, and the closet floor. The bath has to be clear because the toilet is coming out, and the black tank needs to be empty before that happens for reasons requiring no elaboration. If the unit normally lives under a cover, bring the cover, because a coach sitting open through a multi week repair in coastal air is better off covered on the days it is not inside the building. Two pieces of information help before drop off. Where you have felt any softness, described by location rather than by guess, and any history of a leak even if somebody else repaired it years ago. Old repairs are the most common source of a surprise under a floor, because a patch installed without addressing the source leaves a wet area that a meter finds in minutes and an owner had genuinely forgotten about. Photographing the interior yourself before handing over the keys is worth the two minutes it takes. ## Related - [luxury-destination-fifth-wheel](https://ocrv.guru/vehicles/) - [bunkhouse-fifth-wheel](https://ocrv.guru/vehicles/) - [travel-trailer](https://ocrv.guru/vehicles/) - [class-a-diesel-pusher](https://ocrv.guru/vehicles/) - [truck-camper](https://ocrv.guru/vehicles/) --- Source: https://ocrv.guru/services/interior/flooring-replacement/ OCRV Center, 23281 La Palma Ave, Yorba Linda, CA 92887. (949) 799-3387. Serving Laguna Niguel, California. All work performed in shop. No mobile or roadside service. Licences: California Bureau of Automotive Repair ARD00288521; EPA CAL000367879. Published ranges are ranges, not quotes. Every figure traces to https://ocrv.guru/prices/.