Flooring Help for an Older Double Wide

Q: We just bought our first place which we plan on building on in the future. Currently the lot has a 1977 double wide on it which we want to fix up as cheap as possible until we build in a few years. We want to put down pergo floors, but today when we ripped up the carpeting we found a height difference in the seam going down the middle of the mobile home. This is fine except for the living room where the seam is about 1/4 inch higher on one side and we cant hide it. Is there anyway for us to do hardwood in the living room with this seam difference. What do you suggest the best thing to do without it looking corny and not having to spend a lot of money re-base flooring everything? Or should we just do carpeting on one side of the seam in the living room and transition to pergo on the dining room and hallway side. Also what is the best thing to put between the linoleum and pergo floors?
Thanks so much….
A: There are a few things you can do here to make this project succeed. Now if you want to put Pergo throughout the entire home, you can shim the floor up to level out the seam but either installing some additional plywood or you could use a bit of additional underlayment. If you decide to go the underlayment route you will need to use cork. The reason I say this is because cork is the only underlayment with appropriate density to support the difference in amount of underlayment without adding too much spring to the floor. The other benefit here is that 6mm cork is only .035mm shorter than the 1/4″ difference you are looking at, which means the underlayment will make the floor sit almost dead even. From here you will install your underlayment over the entire floor (including over the 6mm cork) then install the floor.
Alternatively, you could split the floor to be half Pergo and half carpet, but you will want to carefully plan the transition at that seam. As far as your transition to linoleum from the Pergo you will want to use a reducer. This transition piece is built to give a nice taper to the end of the floor down to a lower flooring surface (typically wood flooring to linoleum/vinyl).