In the process of replacing our carpets with laminate flooring, I originally elected to retain a 6' x 6' patch of vinyl at the front door. Living in Minnesota and hosting visitors even during our winters, I thought this would be a nice and practical solution to as-yet unknown potential wetness problems.
The problem is that this looks horrible, and it just makes a lot of sense for us to lay consistent flooring right up to the front door, and maybe throw on a rug or something similar at the entrance.
The vinyl sheet is attached to some sort of underlayment. I peeled off part of the vinyl (and scraped off some of the adhesive) and it looks like strips of some sort of plywood. Don't know if it's luaun or other material, but it's definitely cross-grained plywood. I do see staples in a few places, but don't know if such underlayment is typically also glued on.
This is on the first floor, above an unfinished basement.
What would be the best way of removing this, underlayment and all? Essentially, I need to make sure we have subfloor all the way so I can complete laying laminate here.
Here's a photo of the partially-peeled off vinyl:
I cut the vinyl sheet apart with an Exacto knife, and scraped off some of the adhesive. It isn't very obvious in the photo, but the underlayment looks to be laid in strips.
Best Answer
Done. Turns out that there's no glue under the underlayment, instead it's just luaun plywood sheets that are stapled extremely well to the subfloor. Once I was able to grab an edge, it was relatively easy to pry the entire thing off, one sheet at a time.