Interior
Flooring Repair and Replacement
In short: Replacing RV flooring is straightforward and replacing the subfloor under it is not, which is why the first thing worth establishing is whether you have a flooring job or a structural one.
- Typical range
- $750 to $12,000+
- Labor hours
- 6 to 55 hours
- Updated
Flooring is the interior job most often quoted as a surface job and most often discovered to be a structural one. The reason is that the flooring is fine and the panel underneath it is not, and you cannot tell which you have until you lift a corner.
Flooring versus subfloor
The flooring is the visible surface: LVT, vinyl, carpet, laminate. It wears, it stains, it dates, and replacing it is straightforward.
The subfloor is the structural panel underneath, typically laminated plywood, sitting on the frame. It is what actually carries the load.
A floor that feels soft, flexes underfoot, or has a spot that gives when you step on it is a subfloor problem. Flooring does not go soft. Replacing the surface over a compromised subfloor produces a coach that looks new and still feels wrong, while the rot underneath continues.
So the first thing we do is establish which job it is, by lifting flooring at the suspect area and metering the panel underneath.
Materials
Luxury vinyl tile and plank. The default for good reason: light, genuinely waterproof, dimensionally stable across the enormous temperature swing inside a parked coach, and replaceable in sections when something gets damaged.
Sheet vinyl. Lighter, cheaper, fewer seams. Fewer seams matters because seams are where water gets to the subfloor.
Carpet. Warm, quiet, and it holds moisture against the subfloor. It is disappearing from coaches for that reason. Still reasonable in bedrooms and slide rooms.
Laminate and engineered wood. Look excellent. Less tolerant of moisture and of humidity swings, and a closed coach in California goes through very large ones. Workable with care about expansion gaps.
Tile. Heavy, and it cracks when the structure flexes. We will fit it with proper decoupling and substrate support and we will explain the trade first.
How the work runs
Empty and strip. Furniture out, fixed items removed, existing flooring up.
Inspect and meter the subfloor. Across the whole floor, not just where it feels soft, because the wet zone is always larger than the soft zone.
Repair or replace the subfloor. Compromised panels cut out and replaced, edges supported on framing.
Framing repair where required. If the framing under the subfloor has rotted, that is structural work and it happens before anything goes back down.
Trace and fix the water source. Otherwise the new floor is on a timer. Frequently this leads back to roof or slide seal work.
Underlayment and flooring. Run through slide openings rather than seamed at them, because a seam at a slide edge is worked constantly.
Transitions and trim. Sealed at every edge, particularly at the perimeter and in wet areas.
What it costs
| Scope | Typical range | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Surface replacement only, small unit | $750 to $2,000 | 6 to 14 |
| Surface replacement, large coach | $2,000 to $4,000 | 14 to 26 |
| With partial subfloor replacement | $3,000 to $8,000 | 20 to 42 |
| With framing repair | $8,000 to $12,000+ | 40 to 55+ |
Labor is $210 per hour, structural work $260. See the pricing page.
Slide rooms and wet areas
Slide room floors are the most common location for subfloor failure, because water that gets past a seal or off a failed topper arrives at the leading edge of the room floor and sits there.
Bathroom floors are second, from shower pan leaks and toilet flange seals, and they are frequently found only when the flooring is lifted for another reason.
In both cases the flooring job is really the visible part of a water damage restoration job, and treating it as flooring alone is a repair with a short life.
Expansion, and why RV floors buckle
A coach sitting closed in a California summer reaches interior temperatures far above anything a house floor experiences. The same coach at altitude on a winter night can drop below freezing. Every flooring material moves across that range, and the amount it moves over a 40 foot run is not small.
Floating floors need a genuine expansion gap at every perimeter and at every fixed obstruction, hidden under trim rather than eliminated for neatness. A floor laid tight to the walls will buckle, usually in the first hot spell, and it will buckle in the middle of the longest run where it looks like a manufacturing fault rather than an installation one.
Glue-down materials avoid the buckling problem and transfer the stress into the adhesive bond instead, which is why the adhesive has to be rated for the temperature range rather than chosen on price. Adhesive that softens at 60 degrees lets tiles creep, and creeping tiles open seams at exactly the point where water would like to get to the subfloor.
Sequence matters more than people expect
Flooring goes down before cabinetry where the layout allows, and after cabinetry where weight or access forces it. Getting that order wrong is expensive in both directions: flooring cut around cabinets is trapped if a cabinet ever needs removal, and flooring run under cabinets that are then screwed through it has a hundred penetrations in a surface whose whole job is to be continuous.
Our default is to run flooring through the full footprint including slide openings, then set cabinetry on top with fastening into framing rather than through the floor into the subfloor. That keeps the water barrier continuous, which is the point of the floor as much as the appearance is.
Estimates are $150 and credited back against an authorized repair.