I'm remodeling a large room in my basement. It had carpet previously, but I'd like to lay floating laminate down there. I've worked with it before, and while doing the pre-installation prep work, I checked the floor for uneven spots and found one that I'm not sure exactly how to tackle.Here's an image of the room for reference.The area between the green and red lines is a fairly deep (1/2" or so) trough that's more or less flat on either side of the low spot. I'm not too worried about that, as it should be pretty easy to fix with self-leveling compound.About half way across the room, the one side of the trough (green line) subsides and becomes flush with the floor around it, but the other edge continues pretty much the length of the room. The area to the right of the red line (close to the wall) is pretty close to flat and dead level, while the area to the left is also flat, but it isn't quite level. It drops away very gradually until it meets the wall on the left side of the room, so basically there's a ^ shape with one leg level. The difference over 3 feet is right around 1/2", and the flooring I'm looking at specifies a maximum of 1/16" for floating installation. Laying a few planks down over that area as a test, it's really evident that the floor is uneven there and I suspect the flooring would fail pretty quickly. The problem here is that I don't see an easy way to fix this without having to cover the entire room (at a cost considerably higher than the flooring itself) with a pretty deep layer of self-leveling, as it's all going to pool on the far side of the room if I try to do it over a small area.The first alternative that comes to mind would be to sand/grind the ridge flat(ish) to feather out that sudden break so it's within the installation parameters of the floor. I am not finding much information on doing this though, which makes me wonder if it's a bad idea for one reason or another, either concerns over slab integrity or just the shear suck factor of the job.The other option I've come up with would be to lay plywood subfloor over the slab, which sounds like a serious PITA because of existing brick work at the fireplace (behind the camera in the photo) and threshold to an exterior door. Doable, and probably cheaper than a swimming pool full of self-leveling compound, but it doesn't exactly sound like fun.Anybody able to offer some insight or perhaps another way of tackling this problem? via /r/DIY https://ift.tt/2GsQUJy
