You do not put laminate inder cabinets usually so put it in around the cabinets and hopefully whoever is installing it is a perfectionist. I am however curious why pergo on top of realitivly new wood floors.

The pergo is not going on top of the wood floors it is in place of the wood floors. The wood floors are in terrible shape and are only in the kitchen area. The previous owner removed carpeting in the bedrooms and family room and had very cheap laminate installed at a different level then the tile in the bathrooms and the carpet in the other rooms leaving us with a mess of floors to deal with.

When our pergo floor was done the floor butted up to the cabinets. Not under them.

Pergo is traditionally associated with laminate. Why is it in the kitchen?

SJ, it is a durable and easy to clean floor for a kitchen. I had it in my last house' s kitchen and baths. It went through 2 kids, dogs, cats, and a fridge leak with no damage or wear. I also have it in my present kitchen .

Floating floors are installed over the remediated and prepared FLAT subfloors, after removing the existing flooring and doing that EXTENSIVE prep to those subfloors. Using a multitool to cut around those obstacles is a way of getting to that subfloor. Of course it takes additional time, and time is money. But it is the only way to get a good job.

All areas where the finished floor butts against walls or built ins must have an expansion gap. That expansion gap gets covered with shoe molding, usually matched to the trim or built ins.

Once you do all of the prep required for install, the price difference between real wood and plastic wood becomes a whole lot smaller. The added value of installing the real wood more than makes up for the small incremental material costs difference. Labor is always the bigger number if you’ve hired the right labor.

The reason that floating floors is it is easy to install. No nailing, staining or finishing . They can go over the current flooring. You do not have to rip up your current flooring unless there is too many layers of flooring and it would cause a trip hazzard from one level to another. You do not need shoe molding if you remove the present baseboard. You can then put back the baseboard or put in new baseboard. Pergo makes baseboard to match the floor if you like.

Though I never used LVP my son has and it is also easy to install and durable. It is supposed to be more water resistant than pergo.

Hi @clr315, I'm Jordan and I work for Mohawk, owner of Pergo. Don't remove the cabinetry to install your floors (though you could if you needed to - you would just have to ensure that when reinstalling the cabinets, they were affixed only to the wall and did not pin/anchor the flooring in any way).

As the other commenters here have noted, you install the flooring up to the kick plate of the cabinets, leaving a 3 ⁄8" expansion space. Depending on the type of Pergo laminate you have, you then fill either just certain sections of the expansion space with 100% silicone sealant, or fill the entirety of the expansion space with a foam backer rod and 100% silicone sealant. The latter instructions are for our waterproof styles. You then cover the expansion space with quarter round molding. If you have one of our waterproof styles, you first apply a thin bead of 100% silicone sealant to the bottom portion of the quarter round molding that will contact the laminate flooring surface, and wipe away any excess silicone after installing the quarter round molding.

You can get complete instructions for kitchen installations, for both our non-waterproof and our waterproof laminate styles, on the Pergo website. Thanks for choosing Pergo for your kitchen - enjoy your new floors!

Ty Jordan perfect.

Pergo does not belong over original flooring. Nothing Pergo makes looks as good as a restored 1933 floor.

We used laminate upstairs and they said they didn't recommend using any padding on top of the subflooring. We ran into a hiccup because the bathroom floor tiles were much higher than the laminate. We used a transition piece, but it's quite a transition! Even if there was padding, it would have still been quite the level change. If your cabinets are on top of another flooring that has a significant depth difference, you could cover that toe moulding or something similar that matches the laminate. It might expose a gap with the wall moulding and baseboards as well.....that will need adjustment too. We replaced some tile with wood flooring once and were unpleasantly surprised by the depth difference throughout the areas( not with the kitchen cabinets, but with the door casings and the baseboards). We had to put a ton of toe moulding everywhere to hide the gaps...especially around the hallway openings. We would have had to replace all sorts of moulding everywhere otherwise. My hope is that your subfloor is more consistently level that ours was....