Said It Here

How to install vinyl flooring around a base cabinet without molding

Floating vinyl floors require an expansion gap on all sides, which creates a challenge when meeting floor-to-ceiling base cabinets where molding is not an option. Undercutting the bottom of the cabinet allows the flooring to slide underneath while maintaining the necessary gap, but heavy kitchen units should generally not sit directly on top of floating SPC to prevent pinning.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Undercutting the bottom of the cabinet to slide the flooring underneath
  2. 2
    Cutting the flooring around the cabinet and using matching molding or trim to hide the gap
  3. 3
    Leaving a small gap and caulking it with color-matched silicone
  4. 4
    stopping flooring at the edge of the base cabinets
  5. 5
    installing flooring under appliances only

In their words

Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.

r/Flooring2 people · September 2026

“So we are installing vinyl wood flooring which needs to have a gap on every side. However we have this cabinet here that goes all the way down to the floor. Can we go under it by cutting like half an inch off the bottom? I know some people just cut around it and do a some molding to hide, but my wife hates that idea so I’m not sure what else to do with it.”source ↗

drowsey57 · r/Flooring

“Planning to install SPC flooring throughout the house except for the bathrooms. I definitely want to use it in the kitchen too, but the manufacturer's guide recommends not putting kitchen cabinets on top of it, while apparently saying appliances are fine.”source ↗

“What's the consensus here? Are manufacturers just being overly cautious with the expansion warnings, or is there a genuine reason not to run SPC under kitchen units?”source ↗

Apart-Awareness-349 · r/Flooring

Where this came up

r/Flooringdiyflooringhome improvement

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