How To Fix Gaps In Flooring Easily On Laminate, Vinyl (LVP) Engineered Floors | DIY Tips and Tricks!

hi friends welcome back to another episode of fix this house on today's episode i'm going to be showing you four tips and tricks on how you can fix gaps on your floating floors such as vinyl plank flooring laminate flooring or even engineered wood type flooring so i want you to stay tuned [Music] so thank you for tuning in once again i'm jay from fix this 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 today i'm going to be showing you some four tips and tricks on how we can fix these gaps on my vinyl plank flooring so this is actually one of my kids rooms they do a lot of running around here sliding jumping they ride their toy cars here and there so eventually over time it's going to start shifting because it is a floating floor here is the first gap that we want to try to close right there before we actually show you that first step i want you to clean out the gap right here so because over time you're going to have a build up that's going to be going here dust dirt is going to start accumulating in these cracks so what you're going to do is going to try what i'm going to be using are these toothpicks i like using toothpicks because if you use some type of metal like um i don't know like a screwdriver or some kind of knife there's a chance that you might um scratch up your floor but with a wooden pick or like this you can easily just you know dig out the dirt and grind between the flooring and you don't risk damaging your floor or scratching it start vacuuming the cracks the very first tip that i want to show you guys to try to fix this is try to use your shoes first if you have nice grippy shoes like this to test it out when you make contact with the floor you can see that it doesn't slide it has a nice grip on the on the bottom so make sure you have those nice type of shoes and we're going to try to just push it and kick it out we're just going to kick it out forward like this and see if we can get it to close sometimes these planks get so loose over time that you can actually do this easily but in this case you can tell that this floor has a nice tight fit so it does there's actually two cracks right here and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't it might budge a little bit but yeah it doesn't hurt to try doing this step first so to save you some trouble and time so if that shoe trick doesn't work i want you guys to try this tip number two if you get one of these grip pads like what you see here this one you can actually buy in a roll um you can grab one from your toolbox the one i'm getting actually is comes from my toolbox you can just grab a piece cut a little piece of chunk like this this is actually where you can you know put on your your your cabinets to prevent stuff from rolling around or shifting these are fairly cheap go check out on your local hardware store but i'll leave a link on the description down below all the tools that i use on this video actually i'll leave it on the description down below so you can actually access them and make it easier for you okay so go grab one of these and what you're gonna go grab is a two by four a little piece of wood like this it does have to be a two by four any type of wood but here i got a little spare tube about a 12 inch 2x4 that we can use to lay down on top of this grip so let me show you this trick you can see that when you put the 2x4 on top of it it doesn't shift what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna put some weight on the top just one foot should be fine you can put your whole body into it one foot like this should be fine and putting like a little bit of weight a little bit of your body weight put your elbow onto it so that you can have enough room well i highly suggest that you use a rubber mallet don't use just a regular hammer because if you have a regular hammer it's made out of steel and if you missed the floor on tapping this you could possibly just dent your floor or possibly make some damage on your flooring rubber mallet is highly recommended so that if you do miss you're not going to end up scratching your floor [Music] there you have it just took a couple of taps for that thing to close all right so if tip number two doesn't work for you i got tip number three which is actually my least favorite is because you'll know why in a bit and that's using um double sided tape and again use your two by four piece now what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna tape this again this third trip tip and trick method is my least favorite the reason being is that when you put tape on this it's gonna it's a little hard to take off the plank and i'll show you that in a bit so what you want to do is you want to take your 2x4 get your double-sided tape and run a piece of double sided tape on top of that on top of that two by four and then just cut it just like this press nice and firmly on this now you can use your you can use your rubber mallet to press right well right really well on it just like that now this double-sided tape is really stubborn now you're actually figuring out why this is my least favorite out of all the tips the four tips and trick that i show i'm showing you we got actually another gap here right there that we want to take out so let's close this door for a sec you want to make sure that your surface here is clean so if you have like a wet rag just give it a nice wipe so that the adhesive on this doesn't fade out now that's another thing why i don't like this method that much is because if you have plenty of if you have a bunch of these gaps right here and you put it right here this tends to get dirty given you can wipe it off with a wet rag and wait for a little bit for the tackiness to kick to kick back in or you have to take this off and put another strip of double-sided tape it gets pretty hard to take off and you might have to end up using this little tiny pry bar to try to pry this piece of wood off sometimes the double-sided tape will stick to the floor when you take out the wood and you might end up having to try to scrape it off or some and while using the scraper there's a possibility that you might end up scratching your floor with this metal scraper but if you have a plastic scraper that's a different story but again it's just too much hassle but let's see if it does work so let's place it on top okay no movement right there so if you watch some of my vinyl plank flooring install videos i use these tools a lot i have a pull bar and this mallet so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put this pull bar on the end right here because we don't have any room to tap it this is going to act as a hitting plate right there so we can close that off so what we're going to do is we're going to step on this for a little bit and let's see if we can try to tap this gap off right here see that it's all just starting to close boom let's try to pull this piece off so as you can see see this right when i'm pulling starting to pull this off though you can see that i don't know if you can see it but the vinyl plank flooring is actually starting to lift a little bit since this is a floating floor you can see that there's already movement and let me show you what i'm talking about here you see that the vinyl plank flooring is starting to move on the edge given i haven't put baseboards on this yet so don't mind that but it's actually yeah moving along with it because it's stuck in there so what you're gonna do is you're gonna take your mini pry bar right here and just carefully remove it from there and just try it you know carefully pry it off again this is yeah this is number this is the least method that i that i like but there you go it it's actually i'm lucky it was actually starting to peel off a little bit on this edge right here but it still has some tack to it and you can move on to the next one if you're this is good if you're just going to fix one plank but if you have multiple planks that you need to fix i think the fourth method is the best one yet you might want to have a whole roll of double-sided tape if you are going to use this method for plenty of planks but in this case if you're just going to do one i don't mind you using just this method right here and if you have a really close strip right here with a six inch piece um get a smaller piece of wood and do the same concept use your pull bar like this put a little bit of tape right here not on the whole thing but put a little bit of strip right here um and then put it on the edge right there and then tap it on to there that's only if you have a little small piece that's tip number three that's the least one that i like out of all the tips but it actually is very effective but the most effective one that i believe is tip number four and i'll show you right now so tip number four on fixing uh gaps between your vinyl flooring laminate or engineered wood or floating floor whatever you want to call it this is my actually my favorite one and it's using this suction tool right here this is actually used for you know for multiple purposes you can use this to lift up cabinets as long as it has a nice clean surface and you can use this to actually you know remove glass or hole carefully move glass around right here but you can also use it for vinyl plank flooring or any flooring that has a nice smooth surface on this case this has a nice smooth surface it might not work if you have a profile that's a race profile on your vinyl plank flooring and that means that if it has the gaps on your you have that wooden profile texture on your flooring this might not grip because it might have some air bubbles underneath there but this is perfect for smooth surface laminate flooring and vinyl flooring just like what i have here now this is so easy to use make sure you have a nice clean surface doesn't have to be super clean just wipe it with your hand wipe this if it's dusty place it on the floor and then with these levers press down on it so it has a nice suction onto the floor and one of the ends right here all you got to do is use your rubber mallet and tap it in see that let me show you a quick close-up on that closing up right there easy closes up fast so if you have a bunch of these gaps that you need to do in a quick amount of time all you got to do is suction it tap tap tap take out the levers move and then move on to the next plank especially once you start moving one plank the other one the other side it's going to it's like a stair step effect a domino effect the other side is going to have a gap so you're going to keep moving along the line move on tap move on to then keep moving tap tap tap so this is actually one of the best methods i think in my opinion that will make the job you know go faster and efficient all right so all this tools that i use here i'll leave it in the description down below um and you go you can go check that out all right friends so that's pretty much this whole video i hope you found value i hope this helped you out a lot um again you can use any for these methods again if you want to try the shoe method first there's no harm on doing that now actually the quickest cheapest and best way to try it out first if it works um it works but if it doesn't try out the other three methods again best method is using the suction and this rubber mallet trick but overall any of them work it's just depending on your liking okay friends so i hope that you found value to this if you did please hit that big thumbs up press the subscribe button the notification bell so you can always be in tune on diys how-to videos and product reviews that i do within this channel and again thank you for tuning in i'll see you on the next video [Music]

Channel: Fix This House

Views: 1,454,956

Keywords: How to fix gaps in flooring, how to fix gaps in vinyl plank flooring, how to fix gaps in luxury vinyl plank, luxury vinyl plank, how to fix gaps in engineered wood, engineered wood, vinyl plank flooring, flooring tips and tricks, hardwood flooring, how to install vinyl plank flooring, fix gaps on flooring, floor gaps, flooring fix, fix this house, home renovation, home repair, floor repair, flooring how to, bathroom flooring, flooring gap, house renovation, DIY flooring

Id: gbZjJ5gV6GM

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021