I would hold up for another day and try to get someone to come look at the floor. The squeaking should definitely be fixed before you proceed, although in some cases it's easy to fix from below. Your kitchen installers mught be grouchy but they're certainly used to working in existing/older houses and understand that issues arise that need dealt with!

is your subfloor really luan?!?!? I have never seen that. Around here older homes have plank, newer ones have good plywood, much more recent ones have Advantec or similar.

Can you call around and get a couple of contractors to come give you anopinion today? And call DuraCeramic and ask them if your handyman (could call him a small contractor) qualifies as "professional" or if not what sort of credentials they'd need. My guess is: anyone whose business is contracting is "professiona;", just not a homeowner...???

Good luck. In my opinion, it would be better to do it right and lose a couple of days than risk an improper installation or damaging the cabinets later, .

Stacy, thanks for your reply. To clarify, our house was built in the early 70's. The subfloor is plywood (1/2 inch?). I don't know what the existing underlayment material is - it looks white. Then, two different layers of sheet vinyl were installed of top of the underlayment, before we moved in.

When the vinyl in the water-damaged area was pulled up, the underlayment in that area came with it. The plywood subfloor in that area was soft. In other areas, not water-damaged, the underlayment remains and it seems difficult to separate from the subfloor. That's where we see the staples.

A flooring professional would be one who has been trained and certified by the manufacturer to install their product. Handymen would not qualify. Usually, only flooring store employees are ones on the list of trained installers.

You really need a qualified flooring professional to assess your subfloor material and condition before proceeding with anything else. If you had water damage, you also need to inspect your joists. The damage may be more severe than you realize, and the time to correct that is now, not later. No flooring manufacturer will approve luan as a subfloor material, so you may need to replace or cover your subfloor. You will definately need to remove all the staples and sand down any high spots and fill in between the sheets of the subfloor for a smooth continuous surface. A quality install is all in the prep work, and it sounds as though you have a lot of prep work to go. Also, if the flooring will be of any significant height, you need to either install it under the area where the cabinets will go or install plywood of the same thickness as the flooring under where the cabinets will go. A host of other problems comes from installing higher flooring after the cabinets are already in.

Livewire, thanks for your reply. We understand that lauan is not a subfloor - we understand it to be low-quality imported plywood originally intended for use as paneling. However, it is used as an underlayment on top of the subfloor by every flooring person we have talked to so far. Since the manufacturer does not recommend lauan as an underlayment for Duraceramic, we have ruled out all the flooring places we have contacted so far. I guess it's possible that the sales people asssigned to talk to us are using "lauan" as a generic term for underlayment, but so far they have not talked about anything else, such as arctic birch, Halex, or Ulay, as recommended by Congoleum.

We will definitely replace at least part of the subfloor and will cover it with an approved underlayment. We appreciate the advice to look at the joists when the subfloor is removed, to install leveling plywood under the cabinets, and to prep the underlayment - this is the type of information we are looking for.

I would LOVE to find a "qualified flooring professional"! However, EVERY person from a flooring store that I have talked to knows less about DuraCeramic than what I learned from a few hours on the web.

I under-qualified our "handyman" - he is a licensed design/build contractor who has done major additions, etc. However, he has only done small jobs for us and he is not affiliated with a flooring store. At this point, however, we would trust his advice more than any of the so-called "professional" flooring people we have contacted. So far, we have gone through about three quarters of the authorized DuraCeramic dealers listed on the Congoleum website for our area. It's very frustrating!