How To Fill Hollow Spots Inside Vinyl Plank Flooring LVP Laminate And Engineered Hardwood Floors DIY

on this episode i'm going to be showing you how to fill in hollow spots or voids inside your vinyl plank flooring whether it be laminate engineered hardwood floors or just any type of flooring so stay tuned [Music] i'm jay from fix's house if you're new to the channel please consider pressing the subscribe and notification bell so you can always be in tune on diys how-to videos and product reviews that i do within this channel so if you have vinyl plank flooring like what i have laminate flooring engineered hardwood or any type of hardwood floors you might come across this problem where you're stepping on one spot of your house sometimes on near the door it's because there's a lot of you know transitioning of hot air cold air and constantly contracting expanding contracting the wood underneath that floor you're gonna experience some warping under there and might create a hollow spot if i press down here you can see that there is some movement going on on the vinyl plank flooring when i press on this it moves all the way onto this area right here even if when you tap it like this you can start hearing that there's a hollow spot and even a little bit of rattling also so now that you found out where your hollow spot is there are things that you have to consider one is that do you have vinyl plank flooring laminate flooring or engineered hardwood that has the click system my vinyl flooring has the click system which means that between these two seams right here this has a male this has a female end and they pretty much click together so that they can stay in place so that being said if you have any laminate flooring vinyl plank flooring and junior type flooring that has that system where you don't nail it to the subfloor then you can do this option right here rather than drilling which we're going to be i'm going to be showing how to do that you can actually just separate it from the seam if it lands on the seam like like what we have here you can trace it all the way where that that plank is located and make sure that at the end right here i haven't put any baseboards yet or anything like that if it has a little space right here where you can tap and move that seam apart you can actually do that method where i mentioned on that video right here on how to fix gaps you can place it on there put the suction on there and start tapping it so that that seam right here will start to separate but for instructional purposes i'm going to show you how to drill a spot here and inject glue tools that i'll be using to inject that material inside this hollow spot is this cooked mint marinade injector it's used for turkeys or chickens whenever you're cooking something and i got this out of amazon so check out the link down below where i got all this material that i'm using and one is just straight needle just like that which is perfect you can actually go and cut this out attach this right here you can unscrew the top whenever we're filling up okay now we can fill it up with any solution that you have try to find a drill bit that's actually the slightly bigger it's 1 8 inch drill bit and that should be a perfect size for that time to assess where we're going to drill at on this case we're going to try to find the most deepest part of the floor where it sinks i'm gonna drill a little a little hole right here and another hole on another low spot so that when i start injecting the compound through here it's gonna come out and onto the other on the other side by drilling that second hole you're gonna have no air pockets so if you only had one hole and you start injecting there's a possibility that you might create air pockets on the surrounding areas which is not good you gotta allow air to escape on a secondary hole this floor that i have installed is about a quarter inch thick deep okay so you don't want to be going to town and over drilling because if you over drill you're going to start drilling the subfloor and when you start injecting you're probably going to have a hard time you want to try to gauge it so you see that where this tapers off what we need to do is we need to cut this bevel off so i'm just using my cutters and we're going to take this portion off now it's going to get pinched so we have to unpinch it afterwards okay so now that you took it off just like that we have to unpinch it to open up back that hole an example of how it's going to look like when we start drilling so after we drill that hole you're going to insert that into this hole make sure that it fits and i'll show you later on how to cover this up there you go if you want to know how deep this hollow point is just stick your drill bit just like that okay and then you're gonna use a piece of tape now this is just for instructional purposes only so i can show you how deep that goes to where that gap between the material and the blue that's what we need to fill in [Music] two holes that we made but if you look i'm about five eight zoom out that's what it looks like it's not so noticeable unless you really really pay attention to the floor but yeah it's not that noticeable here are a few products that you can use to fill in these gaps you can use great stuff it's good it fills in the gaps but over time it gets crushed and pretty much it gets thin so you're still gonna probably gonna end up with that void in the long term another product you can use is wood glue this is fairly thin and easier to inject inside the floor but i don't recommend putting this onto your floating floor for floating floors are designed to expand and contract and move so this will give it a permanent bond and you don't want that now the next product that i recommend and in my honest opinion is best for floating floors is this dap extreme stretch and this big stretch the reason why i'm using this is because these products allow for expansion because your floors constantly expands and contracts over time and because of the due to temperature change weather change it allows it to move along and move towards different directions and this extreme stretch and big stretch caulking will allow that to happen rather than having it permanently stuck to the floor which will cause problems over time now what you're going to do is you're going to cut off the top of the caulking and just inject it inside the syringe you don't want to over fill this because it's going to be harder to close later on just fill it about three quarters full now before you actually inject this inside your floor test it out first if it's coming out nice and smoothly then inject it onto your first hole now insert this wrench on the first hole and just push it right in now depending on how how big your gap is underneath there you might have to end up doing this two to three times in my case i ended up doing about four times to fill in those gaps but while you're pushing down the product inside your floor you want to gently just tap the surrounding areas so that you can knock all those air pockets and that you can see that and make sure that that product is evenly getting distributed underneath there now if you run out just repeat the same process and as you can see here i'm standing on a certain spot you don't stand into the hollow areas stand into the solid areas around the hole so that that product doesn't spread out to the other areas because once you start filling this in they're gonna there's gonna be air flow going in different directions you wanna control the airflow to go onto that second hole which you see right here now you wanna press down tight a little bit onto that area so that you can squirt out the excess onto those holes that you just made now once that's done just tap around the areas make sure it's nice and solid and you can see that there's no more movement there's no more um hollow spot in this area like what we saw before and then you're gonna constantly get a little bit of overflow coming out of that hole which is okay now place something a little bit heavy on top of there just so that you can get even area while it dries so give it about a few hours for this product to dry and fully settle now i'm going to show you my technique on how to close this vinyl plank floor holes up i just drilled a few holes onto this scrap piece of vinyl plank flooring i chipped off a few edges so that i can have this as a piece to insert into that hole and a few of these remnants from my drilling what i'm using is this solder iron from weller what we're going to be doing is we're going to plastic weld these remnants onto that hole first you want to take those remnants and just plug it in there and just tap it with your solder iron you don't want to keep your solder iron there for a very long time because it will melt so be cautious when you're doing this again this is my method feel free to do this but if you haven't done this that's why we did this on the on a scrap piece of plank so that you can practice before you actually do on your main floor what i'm doing on the second hole right now is i'm taking that little tiny piece that i just chipped off with my box knife and i'm just tapping it in and filling it in while i'm soldering and you can see that i'm just slightly just tapping it and i'm not letting my solder iron to stay or linger there for a very long time because it will melt trust me now let's do it with the actual vinyl plank that i have clean the hole and now we're gonna go and do it actually on the new one so what i'm doing right now is just i'm placing a little bit of that plastic and just melting it inside that hole and if you do it right you're gonna have this piece that just blends it with the hole so let's do it with the second piece and then i'm just gonna solder it just like that i'm gonna start just tapping that extra piece melting it on there and just tapping it with my fingers it doesn't get that hot you don't need to sand this if you do it right so again friends make sure you take your time doing this be very very careful the soldering iron is super hot don't burn yourself and practice before you actually do at your main floor so i hope you found this video very helpful to fix those hollow points inside your flooring alright and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Fix This House

Views: 1,293,443

Keywords: How To Fill Hollow Spots inside vinyl plank flooring LVP laminate and engineered hardwood floors, vinyl plank flooring, vinylplank floors, engineered flooring, engineered hardwood floors, vinyl plank LVP, click system, laminate flooring, vinyl plank flooring install, vinyl plank flooring DIY, engineered hardwood, fix this house, flooring how to, floor gaps, floor voids, flooring hollow spots, home improvement, home renovation, flooring Do it yourself, floor DIY, floors DIY

Id: -MGA3cyLJBc

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021