How to Fix Gaps in Flooring!!! (Laminate, LVP, Engineered wood)

welcome back to vancouver carpenter so how do you close up a gap in plank flooring so it's pretty simple and this is a pretty cool little trick that actually the owner of this job put me on to so i've never actually had to do it this way but it's smart so what you need is a hammer a chunk of 2x4 you will want a knife maybe even a carpet knife because it'll really get into the grooves but you can probably get it done just with a knife double sided carpet tape pro tip if you keep it in the bag if you keep actually all your tapes in a ziploc bag the adhesive won't dry out what else do we have here oh that's about it it doesn't hurt to have one of these floorboard installers though this one is good for getting right in at the ends if the baseboard isn't covering it already and i don't know if they actually come with these little carpet pads on here or not but if you put them on you're not going to scrape up the floor as it moves around so this one's for getting right into the edge and being able to actually hit it anyways let's get right to this one and you may have already figured out what you're gonna do but let me just show you anyways so the first thing you want to do is clean it out and that's where either this guy comes in handy so this one does have a whole bunch of dust and debris in here i can see it so right now i'm just making sure that none of it is actually like stuck in any grooves i'm just loosening up anything that could be stuck in there and once you do that you want to vacuum it out [Music] okay next here's where the magic comes into play so double-sided carpet tape just throw a little chunk on here and this stuff really sticks like really sticks so one thing i didn't mention is you might want a glazier's bar a flat bar to pry this thing up with after because it really gets stuck to the floor so you pull off this and you got some double-sided tape just plunk that down there like that and you can put your foot on it but basically now we can just hit it with the hammer so that one's super nice and closed up now it was easy peasy so now of course we have to take this thing off and like i said it's like it's stuck so that's where i take the flat bar and get it pretty far under because if you don't if you only have it under about a half an inch and then you lift up you might super scrape your floor and honestly if you're doing this on wood flooring not either luxury vinyl plank or laminate you might actually scratch it pretty good anyways with this bar so you want to be careful and it's still stuck on there so i can use it on some other spots if i want to try it too okay so suppose you have one that is smaller than the length of your 2x4 so what you can do in that case is you can take a little strip of tape that's a little bit skinnier than the width of the plank after you vacuumed it out of course and then you can put this here and that's where this one comes in handy so it hooks on right here put your foot right there and now you can hammer so we managed to get that one closed up so suppose you have something that's even smaller maybe you've got one of those horrible little strips that's only about an inch or so i do have a solution for that although i don't have one that i can show you so theoretically in that situation maybe you have one that's just about that wide so what i would do in that case is get maybe about a three quarter or one inch strip of wood put the tape across it and get it as close as you can to there at that point what you're going to want is you're going to want something like this and again something like this and so what you can do at that point is maybe it's kind of too hard to actually hit this but sometimes what you can do is you can just twist this until it puts a bunch of pressure on the wood so twist that a little bit and then even just bang on the wood or bang on this thing but sometimes even just the vibration alone plus the tension that you're putting on there will be enough to slide over one of those real little pieces so there's a lot of ways to go about it and it's all about just applying force from a different direction or applying leverage in a different way that you didn't think about previously the reason i put this flat bar back here by the way is so that i don't damage either the baseboard or the drywall when i start prying on it so that part's actually really important you want to have something back here that protects the baseboard and that's it you guys it's just a quick little tip to help you get those floor boards back together so you can have a little more peace of mind hopefully this video helped you out if again if you're looking for any of those tools check the description below and if you haven't already i'm gonna encourage you to hit that like button it helps me out so also thanks for watching um this is the part where i'm just gonna stop and take off and probably film the next video till the next one you guys hope you're doing well out there and i hope your project's going well

Channel: Vancouver Carpenter

Views: 2,241,313

Keywords: plank flooring, plank flooring installation, plank flooring in bathroom, plank flooring around toilet, plank flooring home depot, plank flooring patterns, plank flooring cutter, plank flooring tools, plank flooring on stairs, plank flooring waterproof, door, install, fix, casing, trim, carpentry, tool, easy, best, review, drywall, tape, taping, tools, fast, repair, mud, crack, hole, wall, patch, plaster, mudding, joint, mesh tape, quickset, paper tape, wallboard, corner, inside, outside, plastering, taper, mudder

Id: BFFH0GrW83U

Length: 5min 53sec (353 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021