Floored.

While the husband's away, the wife will play...or at least start digging up the old floor.  Our plan with the kitchen/family room reno is new wood floors.  Right now we have a mix of carpet and laminate over vinyl.  I finally got the guts to investigate how the floors are under the current craptastic stuff.  So I got out my handy butter knife (note to self-keep an eye out for a chisel at the next estate sale) and the hammer and pulled up the threshold piece, took off the shoe molding and peeled the carpet back from the tack strips and snapped out 2 pieces of the laminate. It was actually pretty easy.

What I discovered underneath is that there are several layers under the kitchen floor on top of the subfloor.  However there isn't any under the carpeted area so it looks like we are either taking out the multiple kitchen layers or to add another subfloor layer in the carpet area to level everything out.   I'm not sure why there are multiple layers under the kitchen.  The vinyl is the original builder vinyl since it matches the other vinyl in the house.  Any ideas why there seems to be an extra layer with some plastic stuff (looks like vinyl) in between?

Let's count the layers: 1. White/gray stripped vinyl. 2. Wooden subfloor. 3. White plastic stuff (vinyl?). 4. More thicker wooden subfloor. 5. Looks to be the actual base floor that sits on the studs.

Layer 5 seems to be the only layer the carpet area has (plus the tack strips but those are easily removed).

I think this flooring upgrade just got more complicated:(