Leveling a Floor for Dummies

Laser levelling a floor

When it comes to home repair and remodeling, we're of the considered opinion that you want to get your advice from professionals or, at the very least, people who've performed the task at hand a time or two. That pretty much leaves out the college students who populated large hunks of the eHow.com catalog back in the day by cribbing information from some website that seemed to be on-topic. Take, for instance, the Hunker.com post "How to Determine If a Floor Is Level": it was penned by college junior Kelly Nuttall (majoring in "communications," of course), who clearly didn't understand whatever she reworded.

Nuttall posted this at eHow in 2009, and Leaf Group moved it to Hunker in 2017; in the process chopping off Kelly's "references." That's no problem, though, because according to the Wayback Machine, her references were both pages of instruction for using floor leveling compound.

At the simplest, you can figure out whether your floor is level (and which direction it slopes) by dropping a marble in the center of the room. Try it at several places, just in case the floor is really wavy. According to Kelly, though, you need a level (presumably a carpenter's level): "The length of the level depends on the size of the floor: small rooms requires a 2-foot level; medium-size rooms, a 4-foot level; and large rooms, an 8-foot level." While 8- and even 10-foot levels are available (for a couple hundred bucks...), most people don't have one. That being said, we were pretty sure Kelly was headed in the wrong direction, anyway, and she proved that quickly:

"Mark the areas that are out of level with a pencil... Use a tape measure to determine how far out of level the floor is. Make a note on the floor next to the pencil line... Repeat this procedure over the whole surface of the subfloor."

God forbid you have a 20 by 30-foot room! But Kelly's procedure raises a serious question: if the floor has both high and low spots, what good are these numbers written on the floor? They refer only to the other end of the level; not to a common datum! We're pretty sure that whatever resource Kelly used (maybe even Daddy or husband Josh) was thinking about measuring along a wall – not across the whole floor.
No, the way to do this is to use a laser level on a stand. When you do that, you are measuring the high and low spots with reference to a single spot in the room. Do it Kelly's way, and your results are going to be every bit as worthless as her third Dumbass of the Day award.¹

¹ That and $4.95 will buy you a caramel macchiato...

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