How To Install Hardwood Flooring (For Beginners!)

welcome back I'm Jen Woodhouse from the house of wood and I am so excited to show you how we installed these gorgeous hardwood floors I mean this is the first time I've ever installed this type of flooring it was so much easier than I expected and it looks incredible and I am so lucky to have my very dear friend Josh bridging him here josh has a ton of experience building and remodeling homes so he made sure we got off on the right foot and really set us up for success and looking back this project was totally doable as a beginner and it was way less complicated and intimidating than I expected the most important part to me on a project like this is making sure that you get started off on the right foot I think there's an old saying that says if you fail to plan you plan to fail so it's really important that you take a little bit of time and I know that's hard a lot of times you're you're anxious you're in a hurry to get that floor down and see you know this is this beautiful product installed but it's just it's really wise and important to stop and get everything laid out correctly the first it will save you a lot of of time grief and heartache in the long run so we decided to pick the longest wall exterior wall in the home and that gave us an opportunity to make sure we had a long straight clear benchmark so to speak to start from typically when you're laying floors in a single room you can measure the room to make sure your first and last planks are similar in width in other words you don't want your first point to be at full width and then your last plank to be super skinny you kind of want to split the difference so it looks more professional well because we installed this flooring across our entire first floor of our house it was next to impossible to ensure that every first and last plank in every room would be the same width so there are a lot of different walls and doorways that the floorboards would die into so we just skip that step and then started laying the planks as is knowing that we might have to adjust along the way and it still turned out incredible and it just worked out really well for us alright so now that our chalk line is snapped we're gonna roll out the underlayment you can secure the underlayment with staples if you want but once the floors are laid on top of it it shouldn't shift too much underneath it's really important that you get that first run shimmed and brace to the wall because this is a floating floor project we're not using you know nails or fasteners so it's really important that it be shim and embraced to the exterior wall so that as you're moving across the floor that stays solid and it stays right where you want it to be you know we had these really handy shims that are adjustable that work really well in most applications unfortunately for us we weren't able to use them because of the way that the this home was constructed the drywall stops a little bit short of the of the ground which made the shims that we had when a buckle underneath there into that gap so it was just wiser for us to cut custom our own shims not a big deal once we had our chalk line from left to right we just were able to measure off of that figure out what thickness of shims that we need took us about an extra half hour I would say once we had those in place we were able to start get our first run in and from then it was off to the races we chose a wide plank engineered hardwood it's called French oak Delano by Malibu wide plank and it's available at the Home Depot I'll leave a link in the description box below so you could check it out alright my favorite thing about this flooring is that it's click lock so installation was super easy any homeowner can tackle this project and save themselves thousands of dollars on the install this flooring can be installed as a floating floor meaning it's not nailed or glued down or it can be glued down we chose to float it because it's just easier less messy and I'm a bit afraid of long term commitments you can install this floor on above or below grade and no acclimation is required I love that it comes in various lengths with 70% of the planks being the longest at 48 inches okay so let's take a closer look at this click lock feature there's a tongue and groove so that each piece fits together like a puzzle so once you lay the tongue in the groove it should click and lock into place easily you shouldn't have to wrestle with your floorboards if you are then something's not right they really should lay down nice and flat with the joints tight so we laid the first few rows down starting from left to right top to bottom checking periodically to make sure that we were staying parallel to that chalk line that we snapped as more rows are being laid the floor becomes more secure we laid the planks in a random pattern making sure to stagger the seams there should be a minimum of 6 inches from the seam of one board to the seam of the board below it in other words don't line up your seams we also made sure to pepper the boards that had a more striking grain pattern evenly throughout the room so that they weren't right next to each other for vents floor outlets around door jams and other obstructions we had to cut or notch out parts of the floor boards so we just took our measurements and then use the jig saw to make these cuts and here's a handy measuring trick instead of using a tape measure lay the board in place flip it over make your mark and then make your cuts [Music] [Music] [Music] there were times when we'd have to trim the door casing so that the floorboard would fit underneath it and we use the Dremel multi-max for this which worked really well [Music] once all of the tricky parts are taken care of installation will go pretty fast it was easy to make great progress in very little time and because we're floating the floor it's easy to go back and lift up the planks if we made a mistake this type of flooring is incredibly forgiving if there's one thing I can tell you it's to just start don't be afraid of making mistakes you probably will and that's okay it might take more time but because there are no nails or glue involved it'll be fairly easy to course-correct oh and knee pads definitely do not skip the knee pads they were our saving grace I cannot believe that we did this it was our first time laying hardwood floors and it looks absolutely amazing I am so proud of how it turned out oh and please excuse the missing baseboards and trim they're on order and hopefully it'll come in and we can install them before we have to host Thanksgiving next month ten percent we have to be smart citrus where's the ketchup Jen should walk over there and we are installing this beautiful engineered hardwood from shoot professional scene this gorgeous engineered hardwood from and I'll leave the link to this fluorine right here hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more DIY projects and home renovations you'll find more info on Jen wood house calm and I am at Jen wood house on Instagram and Facebook so let's be friends it'll be fun thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Jen Woodhouse

Views: 401,859

Rating: 4.7498531 out of 5

Keywords: DIY, do-it-yourself, tutorials, how to, flooring, hardwood floor, home renovation, home reno, hardwood flooring, remodel, how to install hardwood flooring, how to install hardwood, hardwood floor installation, hardwood flooring installation, engineered hardwood, click lock flooring, click lock hardwood flooring, engineered flooring, engineered floor installation, engineered hardwood floor installation, engineered wood flooring, floating floor, floating floor install

Id: UMEO2T7dv_8

Length: 7min 53sec (473 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2019