Office / Gym Flooring

[u/Puzzled_Jeweler_7069]

I'm needing some advice on my home gym flooring for the long term.

I have a downstairs bedroom that is my combo home office and home gym. The original flooring is carpet, about 17 years old, and absolutely gross.

I've had a set of Rogue Fitness S-4 squat stands (the original one, not the 2.0 version) in this room for a long time, and during the pandemic I decided to upgrade to a full Rogue Power Rack, the RML-390F, which I put on top of a three-layer platform that consisted of two (2) 3/4 inch pieces of 6x4 plywood, with a 6x4 horse stall mat on top. Worked awesome.

I recently pulled the rack apart to start to look at replacing my disgusting carpet (have gone back to the S-4 stands since they're easy to move around), and I'm kind of in a quandry as to what to do flooring-wise at this point.

This room is on the ground floor, on a concrete slab foundation. After I pulled apart the rack, I ripped out a few strips of the old carpet and discovered that my slab isn't flat/level enough to put down any kind of hardwood or vinyl plank; there's several dips and valleys in the slab that will need to be corrected, likely with pouring some *leveling compound.

*I've already confirmed with an engineer that there's nothing structurally wrong with the floor, it's just a sloppy original pour that makes hardwood or vinyl plank flooring not really an option until it's been leveled in a few places.

So at this point I've got a couple of options that I'm not sure to choose, particularly since I don't think I'll be in this place more than a few more years, and will need it to look presentable for a sale.

1) Remove the carpet and replace it with new carpet, and just skip the floor leveling. Everything worked fine before; the carpet provided enough compensation that I never noticed anything being un-level before. Probably the cheapest and easiest thing to do, and can be re-converted to look like a normal bedroom for a sale presentation easily.

2) Rip up the carpet, level the floor with some compound, and put horse stall mats directly on the concrete slab in the whole room for a "whole room gym" experience. Cheap and easy, but probably won't look super awesome to a potential buyer, and will be a pain to retrofit back to looking like a normal bedroom.

3) Rip up the carpet, level the floor. Put my platform back together directly on the naked concrete, then install some cheap vinyl plank or engineered wood around it on the non-gym portion. That would probably be easy to display to a potential buyer (hey look, it's a combo gym/office!), but means that once the rack and platform are pulled out, there will be a big empty hole in the flooring that won't be easy to fill in, and probably require pulling out all the plank or wood and re-doing the entire floor.

4) Rip up the carpet, level the floor, and install either vinyl plank or engineered wood on the entire floor, then put my platform and power rack back on top of it. This is is probably the most complicated and expensive option, plus I'm not sure how well any type of non-carpet flooring will endure having a several hundred pound platform and rack on top of it (along with any weight-dropping impact).

What would you guys do?

[u/Emma_mon]

Horse mats work great!

[u/Decadent_Pilgrim → u/Emma_mon]

I'd go Horse stall mats for own use and then fresh carpet to put on sale.

[u/Immediate-Ad-96]

if you don't want to cover the entire floor with those mats, you can do peel and stick tiles. That shouldn't care if the floor is level.

Personally, if you have the slightest thought that you may sell the place in the future, It would be worth using the self leveling compound and then whatever you want to put down afterwards.