How to Separate a Floating Wood Floor

Floating wood floors do not attach to the surface of a subfloor with adhesive or hardware. Instead, the flooring planks snap together using the tongues and grooves on the plank edges and just “float” on the subfloor. This method of installation makes moving flooring planks easier than moving attached flooring planks. If you want to separate a floating wood floor, you must work from the perimeter of the floor inward.

Putty knife

Instructions

- 1
  Take up the trim at the bases of the walls around the edge of the floor. Use a putty knife to slice through the paint between the trim and the wall and then pry the trim forward with the putty knife to pull the nails free.
- 2
  Go to the edge of the floating wood floor on which the grooves in the planks show. Move to the plank at one end of that row.
- 3
  Lift the first plank in the row up to a roughly 45-degree angle from the floor. Pull the plank toward you to remove the tongue in the plank from the groove in the row before to separate the plank from the rest of the floating wood floor.
- 4
  Remove all of the planks in the first row in this manner. Separate the entire floating wood floor by removing one row of the floor at a time, plank by plank until you have separated all of the planks.

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