A few years back I had vinyl place on my kitchen floor. The sub floor was in such bad shape that the installers had to lay 3/4 inch plywood. I'm now having tile installed in the kitchen which requires 3/4 inch of backboard. The problem is that with the additional 1 and 1/2 inches of sub floor I have no clearance to maneuver my dish washer. I could leave the dishwasher as is but I know that one day the dishwasher will fail and I'll have to replace it. Any ideas how to get around the potential problem???
dk wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:
You need to shim up the floor cabinets to meet the existing floor or you can't get around it. If I read this right, it's not a good idea anyway to try and makeshift this into a matching problem. You would either need to raise all the countertop, 3/4" or shim the floor cabinets up and have a true installation. Either way the counter tops are the big deal.
Rip up the 3/4 plywood, and replace with the backer board. Since you say dishwasher would be trapped, I assume they didn't go under the cabinets. Only other 'proper' cure is to pull the base cabinets, infill subfloor to same height, and reinstall cabinets, either before or after the new backer and tile floor. I'm old fashioned, and prefer cabinets to go in last. Avoids wicking between layers when leaks happen. Material is cheaper than labor, anyway- a lot quicker to lay floor wall to wall, and anyone can install base cabinets. (Hell, if they paid ME to do it as a kid, it can't be that hard...) And with a full floor, when the new tile makes the cabinets look seedy next year, a lot easier to switch them out, and maybe change the layout a little.
If your original sub floor was so bad they had to use 3/4 to level it out, I'd be concerned about it being stiff enough for tile. Have they checked for deflection under load? I don't remember formula, bit someone quotes it on here regularly.
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