DIY PLYWOOD FLOORS | how to make and install geometric plywood floors

hey everybody my name is Mike Montgomery and today I'd like to show you how I made this DIY plywood wood floor on modern builds I'm going to be using 1/2 inch birch plywood to make my floors and if you're curious why I'm using plywood make sure and stick around until the end of the video where I'll be explaining that I'll be cutting my plywood to its final size on the table saw but first I used my track saw to break it down into more manageable pieces this is ultimately gonna give me a few less pieces per sheet but the convenience and safety is totally worth it I'm gonna be cutting this plywood into six inch wide strips and here you see me making sure that my blade is Square to the table and that my fins is squared to the blade I'm doing that by making sure the distance from the fence is the same from the front of the blade in the back of the blade then I grabbed my RZ mask because I'm gonna be kicking up a lot of sawdust and I started cutting all of my six-inch wide strips now you may have noticed a 3/4 inch piece of plywood spring clamped to my table saw fence and right now it's not doing anything I'm going to be using it later on as a part of a jig but between cuts I need to make sure and not move my fence that's why it's there if that doesn't make sense right now be patient with me and it will later on after I had all of my strips cut I grabbed the miter gauge for my table saw and as you can see there are positive stops at common angles and here you see me using a wood shim to disengage that instead of relying on those positive stops I'm gonna be using a digital angle finder that's far more accurate next I set it to the correct angle sixty degrees and I used that to set the miter gauge to the blade with the miter gauge set I could remove that old piece of 3/4 inch plywood from the table saw fence and replace it with a shorter piece that's the same thickness this is gonna act as a stop block allowing me to make the same size piece every cut using this shorter piece of 3/4 inch plywood makes it so that the pieces can't get trapped between the fence and the blade after they're cut if the longer piece of 3/4 inch plywood was still there and any of these pieces were inclined to twist after they were cut that would cause kickback anytime you're doing a repeating task like this a lot of times it can get monotonous but make sure and stay focused and remember you've got a spinning blade right next to your hands and we don't want to lose any fingers once all of my pieces were cut I grabbed my random orbit sander with a 120 grit and I rounded over the bottom corners of all of my pieces this dusk mask that I'm using is called an RZ mask if you're a fan of my channel then you've seen me wear them all the time they're super lightweight comfortable and convenient if you're interested in learning more there's a link down in the description and don't forget to use the code modern builds that check out of course you should do some tests before you cut all of your pieces and if you find that there's a small gap on the inside of your hexagon then you cut your angles too sharp and you need to do a slightly more obtuse angle if your gap is on the outside of your hexagon make a micro adjustment so that you have a slightly sharper angled parallelogram after doing some adjusting you should have a hexagon with no gaps welcome to my parents attic where I'm going to be installing these floors currently I'm in the process of converting this space into a home theater for them what you see me doing right here is laying out some chalk lines so that I have some references for straight when I install all of my pieces the two walls in this space weren't perfectly parallel they were out about three inches from the front to the back taking a little bit of time to measure all my walls and get to know this space before installing the floors definitely made me a lot more comfortable I snapped a line laterally every 12 inches and I made sure that this perpendicular line was perfectly 90 degrees I feel like I should mention you don't have to start at the center of a room like I am but if you can tell I'm in a really weirdly shaped room and my walls are not perfectly parallel so for me starting in the center is going to help but if you've got a good square room it might actually be easier to start at the corner I started at the intersection of two chalk lines and I used that to line up the four corners of my piece I'm using a 16 gauge brad nailer to toenail my pieces into the OSB subfloor underneath I also added a thin bead of gorilla wood glue to the joining edges of each of my pieces that way they all linked together of course I didn't want these to be impossible to remove from the OSB subfloor in case I ever needed to remove a piece that's why I didn't glue the pieces to the OSB I found that fully assembling my hexagons before nailing down my pieces helped to align everything in reduce gaps this first row was painstakingly slow but I knew it was important to take my time and to make sure that this first row was straight since all of my other pieces are going to be referencing this later on [Music] projects like this are great for me to catch up on my favorite podcasts if you also like to listen you should check out my podcast the modern maker podcast how many times when I say podcast as I ran my pieces I always kept a chisel with me to clean up the OSB subfloor before installing any of my pieces even though I did a broad clean and vacuum the OSB before installing the floors I did miss a few things and occasionally the OSB itself needed to be chiseled down a little bit for the pieces to sit flat as I approached the wall I decided just to complete all of the solid hexagons and save all of the small fittings for later on at this point in the day I was very happy to have this first row established everything started moving really quickly from here with that first row installed all I needed to do was put my new pieces in place double-check that there weren't any gaps and toenail those pieces in the one big piece of advice that I'd like to give is to make sure and check the grain orientation of each of your pieces before nailing them in but you'll know this is a repeating pattern but it's also a seamless pattern that means that there's really no start and end it's just a bunch of hexagons that go on forever this makes it easy to sort of get lost in fact I caught myself a couple times almost installing a piece the wrong orientation so just be conscious while you're doing this really quickly while I install the rest of those flooring pieces I'd like to give a big thanks to this video sponsor Squarespace let's be honest whether you're doing something creative or building a business you're gonna need a website whether that's for a portfolio to show off your work or a landing page to bring people in Squarespace has a huge library of built-in designer templates that look incredible right out of the box that means you need it 0 website building experience all you have to be able to do is move and fill text and image blocks to create a one-of-a-kind site and from there Squarespace has the tools to create a website that says creative or robust as you would like my favorite part about Squarespace by far is that they let you try before you buy that's right if you follow the link down in the description Squarespace coms forward slash modern builds you can build out an entire Squarespace website before entering any of your credit card info that's just how confident Squarespace is in their product once it is time to sign up though make sure and use the code modern bill it's a check out for 10% off your first site I was a Squarespace user long before they were a sponsor of modern builds and I couldn't be more happy or proud to recommend them to you all now back to the bill here you see me up the table-saw cutting some pieces to fill in around the walls and at the edges of my floors like I mentioned I decided to do this all at once I figured since I'd be running up and down the stairs from the Attic to the garage it would be a little bit more convenient to just do it all at once the great thing about floors and construction at large is that there's always a trim piece going in to hide your mistakes that means that none of these filler pieces have to be incredibly precise it's just important to make sure that there's no gaps between the existing pieces in my main attic renovation video which will be linked in the description I will go into detail about how I did all of the trim in the borders so make sure and check that out if you're curious now I bought and tried every different brand wood filler that I could for this project and I found that DEP plastic wood in a tube is the best color match for this virtual I what I had really it's about a half shade lighter than the wood which actually helps to minimize any of the small gaps in between the pieces and help everything look a little bit more seamless after applying the wood filler I came back with a damp rag to remove it all from the plywood surface from there I grabbed a Gator 150 grit sanding block and I used that to clean up all of the plywood faces or anywhere that there were two plywood edges that didn't meet perfectly I found that actually holding the block at a 45-degree angle helped knock down any raised edges of plywood [Music] to finish the floors I'm going to be using a very thin water-based polyurethane and I'm going to be applying for thick coats I'm going to be applying it with this giant sponge thing that's actually marketed for decks and fences typically for furniture projects I use a foam brush for applying water-based polyurethane and I figured this was going to give me the closest results with a large form factor now before anybody says that I know that Vera Thayne makes a water-based floor finished but they didn't carry it at my local Home Depot and I was not about to use an oil-based finish on these floors you can see that even with this water-based finish the floors get so much richer and deeper and I didn't want them to amber which oil-based finishes can cause maple and birch to do but I'll be sure to leave that water-based floor finish linked in the description if you're interested after applying a second third and fourth satin coat of finished in these floors they were done [Music] so I really do hope you enjoyed this video these floors took a lot of time I'm not gonna lie it was probably about 80 hours of work but as you can tell by this face it was totally worth it I think it's so amazing how you can take one single shape replicated a ton of times and have such a cool seamless pattern now I'm gonna go ahead and get ahead of the comment and answer why did I do plywood instead of solid wood and the reason for that is expansion and contraction as heat and humidity changes Wood has a tendency to either expand or contract respectively this isn't a huge problem with traditional solid wood flooring because they have an overlapping joint on their edges that causes them to lock together and not be able to do that that overlap also makes its where there's no gap between the boards because they're on top of each other now this may be old news to some of you guys new news to others but plywood is stable that means it doesn't expand and contract with the grain because the plies alternate grain orientation of course a plywood board can bend or warp I think that's happened to everybody but it won't expand and contract and since this is such a low traffic area I'm not too concerned with the veneer having any difficulty staying intact and if there ever is by chance a problem I can always come back to my parents attic where I installed this cut that piece out and install a new one I've got about 20 pieces left over I think it'd be silly to say there's no way something could go wrong but if there ever is something that does I'll be sure to update with a video to let you guys know if you're new to my channel I would welcome you to subscribe down below that way you can stay updated every time I post new videos the next video I'll be releasing is this entire attic to home theater renovation that I mentioned earlier so make sure it hit that notification bell if you're really interested in that project if you have any questions if you want to get a hold of me you can do that down below in the comments or you can hit me up really quick with a DM on Instagram I'm really easy to reach their links for all the tools and supplies that I use for this project will be down in the description along with the link to the written article thank you guys for watching I appreciate it greatly and we'll see you next time on modern builds bye everybody [Music]

Channel: Modern Builds

Views: 873,616

Rating: 4.9079022 out of 5

Keywords: modernbuilds, modern builds, diy, how to, do it yourself, plywood, wood floors, install, installation, how to install, how to install plywood floors, how to make, geometric, diy geometric floors, vintagerevivals, plywood floors, harringbone, chevron, pattern, craftedworkshop, fixthisbuildthat, iliketomakestuff, homemademodern

Id: 5obKgpj1G3I

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019