How to Install Laminate Floor DIY - Master Class A to Z

oh hello again my fellow do-it-yourself remodeler friends of the internet welcome back to another great video today as you can see I'm standing in the middle of this living room here in our latest condo flip project here and today we are going to show you how to install laminate flooring and by the way the laminate flooring is pretty much the same as regular wood flooring so we're showing you essentially how to install wood flooring into your condo project [Music] okay so this is the type of flooring that we're going to be installing today and what's interesting about this this is what we call glueless flooring some people also refer to this as a floating floor and the way this works they also call them a click lock because the pieces usually click lock like this snap break down together and that's how you install the floor all the way down the line and this is different from the other two forms of wood installation other types of wood flooring installation would be called glue down where you would glue these down and that's a more permanent and same with nailing so with nail down you would be using a nail art going right through these tongs here yeah ok so in this video today we're going to show you everything about installing us wood forth and start to finish including how to determine if your floor even qualifies to have wood on it and everything on how to prepare the subfloor how to use the right type of underlayment here the more important a kind of follow the directions of your manufacturer because if you don't follow the directions to the T you will void your warranty and so I'm going to give you tips during this whole installation process to keep you from voiding your warranty because that's the last thing in the world after all of that hard-working please all right so you can see we've taken our delivery of wood flooring today and let me just remind you the day you receive the wood is not the day you install it so that's the first mistake that a lot of people make they think oh what's here let's go ahead and start installing it on the floor that's not what you're supposed to do that's why I tell you over and over again to read the manufacturer's instructions and they're all different so you have to read it from start to finish and in here this particular manufacturer says you have to leave that this wood so in the Box in this room where you're installing it for 48 hours some manufacturers require 72 hours and I've even seen some require a week so you need to know how long that manufacturer wants you to have the wood sitting here and the reason is that they wanted to acclimate to the exact temperature and humidity environment that it is going to be living in so that's all ready to go for you if you were to just take this wood flooring and throw it down on the floor and start putting it together you're likely to either see shrinkage or expansion to much later on and squeaking you want to avoid squeaky floors okay now before you decide to rush out and buy all that wood flooring or laminate flooring for your installation you have three things that you have to do first folks okay number one you have to determine if your room qualifies to have wood flooring or laminate flooring installed into this room number two you have to determine what type of environment you have because that determines what type of wood flooring and wood laminate that you can buy you have to determine whether you're above grade or at grade or below grade and thirdly what you must do is you have to be able to prepare your subfloor to accept the wood flooring okay so here's how we determine what's the best type of wood flooring to get for your particular environment here so I've created this little PowerPoint slide here for you to show you the three common placements that you're going to see for wood flooring so you can either have a basement floor which is considered below grade or you could be at the ground floor which is considered at grade C there's a grass there's your soil there and then the third common case is like on an upper floor where you're above grade okay now sometimes you get lucky and you get wood that can handle all three grades okay you're probably wondering why does this matter from above grade at grade or below grade well down in the basement is usually a unique situation because you have moisture coming up through the foundation slab cement is actually like a sponge and it just takes in moisture from everywhere so you have to have a wood flooring that can handle that kind of moisture and of course you need to have you know a moisture barrier put down as well at the ground floor you may or may not get some moisture and of course on upper floors there's no problem at all okay so we've chosen our wood plank here or this is a laminate plank here and let me just show you some of the criteria we look for number one I choose the longest plank I can get and there's a couple of reasons for this number one the longer plank you can get the fewer lines you'll have going as you place them down the row here so these are 52 inches long and these are six and a half inches wide so I always tell people get the longest widest plank you can get the wider planks look modern and they'll make your room look bigger because you won't see you know going across the floor all these tiny little three-inch you know lines going across so they'll install quicker you'll have fewer lines and it'll look nicer and cleaner okay and then the next thing you want to look for is a thicker laminate so if you look here down the profile of our of our laminate piece here you can see on top there the dark that's your laminate so that's a 12 millimeter laminate there some of them are 8 millimeters and I don't recommend them because they're thinner they're not as high quality and they're not as durable and you won't get as long a warranty either and then below that you can see this is the MDF layer that's the medium density fiberboard and then this one if you look at the bottom of it it's nice and shininess that makes it a lot more resistant to water it doesn't mean it's waterproof it just means it might buy you more time if it gets wet and then of course here you want to look for the simple drop block floating installations you don't want to make the mistake and by the wrong wood thinking you're doing a floating floor and you get the wood here and open it up and find out it's a it's a glue type or a nail down type so you always want to check your flooring before you buy it your laminate flooring in your wood flooring and then I also look for here there's durable ac4 rating you could do an AC 3 rating so AC 1 through 3 is basically residential this one here is the first level of commercial rating and so because it's AC 4 it gives you a this has a lifetime warranty if you're using it in residential only but if you use it in a commercial environment I believe they cut it down to only a few years ok so this is our wood so for example one of their criteria they have here on this one here this manufacturer wants you to have a humidity between 35% and 65% this is why it's a problem for people who live in Arizona that have a super dry desert climate and they wonder why hey why did my floor just fail long after I installed it you know realized people apparently don't tell them out there but the floor can dry up and shrink up and your planks will become all loose on you after you install it that's because you have to have a humidity though in some places that they actually have to have humidifiers so anyway let's test our humidity level here all right so here what I have here is a digital thermometer that also tells your relative humidity so if we come in and take a closer look at it you can see right up here in numbers right up at the top here tells us we're at 48 percent humidity 49 percent and so we're well within the range remember the manufacturer says they 135 percent to 65 percent okay okay so the next thing that the manufacturer requires is they want you to take a humidity meter and they want you to put it down on the floor and test the humidity so that's what we have here we've got this humidity meter and this one you can see right here you can set it to either wood or in my case what they call building which means building material or cement and what you do is you just set it down on the on those surface there and it will tell you the percent so let's go down here and set it down to the ground here right onto the cement and let's see what it reads so right now it's telling us 5 percent 6 percent and that's generally below the level that they tell you that you need to be worried about it and we're gonna pretend this piece of wood is our wood subfloor and we're gonna measure it here and see what this says in here so it says nine point six percent put it on hold it there so there we go so we're at nine point four percent now and the manufacturer says that the moisture must be below 14 percent so you know that in this room you would be okay if you had a wood subfloor okay the other thing to qualify for the wood flooring here is see this entire we have a cement slab here we're on the second floor of a condominium so we're in the ideal position here because we are above grade on a cement slab on a building that's 40 years old so it's more than cured but and it looks reasonably flat but the way you're supposed to do this is all right so you can see here I've got these three buckle here this is a six footer and when you lay it down it should be pretty flat so this is good this thing smacks down perfectly like that see and so what they want is the manufacturer of this particular laminate plank they want no more than 3/16 of an inch difference like this between a 10-foot run of the floor I'm a little more strict it sort of follows the same rule I like to go no more than an eighth of an inch across six feets over here I could probably find an area where it's not so that's about the most you want to have and if you find any areas where there's any big dips or Hills on your cement slab then you're going to have to get rid of those either by filling it in with a self-leveling compound now if you take a look at this video that I've got that I'm showing you here right now this was a project in a condo flip that I a couple of years ago where the Builder did such a horrific job of the slab up there on the third floor by the living room and by the sliding glass door that we had to pour down a whole bunch of stuff levelling compound until we could get 40 nice and flat like you see here so that we could then put the wood flooring down so you can see there is a lot of work that you have to do it at a time and if you fail to do this right here that we're talking about you stand a chance of voiding your warranty on the wood flooring this would be a perfect time if you haven't already to hit that subscribe button down below and once you hit that subscribe button you'll see that little gray Bell click on that and that will alert you to every time we put a new video so that you'll never miss a video and also if you like our video here you can click on the thumbs up button down below that lets us know that you like us and any questions you have please enter them in the comments down below too okay now if we zoom in here and take a closer look at this right here this is a chunk of cement I guess that the Builder had left behind so things like this this thing sticking up probably at least an eighth of an inch off the floor we have to chisel to let off before we're done and if you likewise if you see any large chokes on paint you have to get rid of those and you see all these little craters here along the perimeter of our wall like we're here and then down here and down here these are former nails from the carpet strips that were here so we took up carpeting before that we put down this flooring here right and the nail tack strips those nails leave a lot of damage behind and you want to make sure that's all cleaned up and that there's no rising chips sticking up off the floor no nails and he leftover nails sticking up so you can see there's a lot of work you have to do to your subfloor before it's ready to accept that wood flooring you don't just pull it out of the box and throw it down more okay so now choosing your underlayment and by the way every single wood flooring you should put underlayment down and in fact it's required by code in many condos and multi-story dwellings in fact if you put down a floor and you didn't put down an underlayment and your neighbor finds out about it downstairs and gets mad turns you into the city they can make you come in to tear the whole thing out again so make sure you buy a good quality underlayment and if you were doing tile flooring on an upper floor from somebody you have to put down quarter-inch pork before you put down that tile so was it just things to think about for your underlayment and don't skimp on your underling just three trades there's a premium braid this is a good solid medium grade here and then there's the really sheepy thin grade that almost looks like a white cellulose that that's super cheap don't find that TP stuff don't try to save a few bucks there that's not the place to save a few bucks so this is what you want this is reasonably thick this is almost an eighth of an inch thick so you want a nice thick rubbery and the premium one by the way is made out of recycled tires and that's the best one because it has the most sound suppression so these their purpose is to add sound suppression to give a little bit of stability there under the under the planks and then you can see they have a moisture barrier built into one side right here when you put these together you want to overlap them you want to overlap this here so this high-quality one has the waterproofing built into it and that's what you wanna lay down okay so before we will decide I wanted to mention to you the pricing so this was about 60 cents a square foot the premium stuff is about 70 cents a square foot and the cheapy stuff can be 40 cents or below per square foot and so you got a really plan accordingly so in this whole project here we're doing about 680 square feet so we bought 700 square feeling this underlayment that's seven rolls they come 100 square feet per roll and sometimes you can buy the roles that have 400 square feet on and they're a lot bigger and heavier to handle these it is a lot more manageable to just pick up seven rules of this okay okay so another question that comes up a lot is hey which direction am I supposed to mount this boring should I go this way or gonna go this way now typically we usually like to go down the little along side of the room okay so that's one way of doing it and typically that coincides with the direction that the light is coming in most of the manufacturers prefer that you have this floor aim facing the direction that the light is coming in like this so we're going to be mounting this flooring this right here so the lengthwise length of this flooring is lined up with the way the light is coming in and there's another reason why we've won here too so if we look down here at this floor okay so let me show you another reason why we're doing it this way so as you bring the flooring down here and you see see we have to line this wood flooring up against this curved top floor here all the way down the problem is is how do you how do you line up to it so what we're going to be cutting each one individually to line up parallel with this right and it's a lot easier to chop saw the end of it to line up at an angle then it is to rip down if I was to put boards like this not too bad just remember the boards are gonna be like this though so by time you get up to the end you're gonna be left with a wedge piece so we decided that's not the optimum way to do this we want to be more like this and it's easier to just cut this at a slight angle to make it will leave like a space like that and we'll use a tea molding that goes over here we're going to be getting a flexible tea molding and we'll do a separate video on that too and on how to do the flexible team holding for you but that's why we're choosing the orientation and then likewise here in this guest bedroom you can see the window is there and the lights coming in this way so that's why we're going to be putting the wood planks going this way facing the window okay and lastly and this probably doesn't apply to too many of you but they want to make sure that if you're putting wood flooring down onto cement slab here that if this is a new construction house you've got to make sure the slab has been there probably 30 days it has to be fully cured before you can go ahead and put any kind of flooring down and that includes tile or you know basically anything because if it's not cured yet that means the concrete is still moving doing whatever it's doing and it can crack on you it can cause the floor to crack and that would also void your warranty as well yeah by the way the manufacturers want you to use a calcium chloride test really to test the amount of humidity on the concrete floor but you know really this is reasonably close enough okay so you roll out the underlayment here like this and what they want you to do see this is your moisture barrier here they want you to bring it up near the wall and they want this to go up the wall about two inches or so and the reason why they want that is this is what helps give you a nice moisture barrier to protect your floor so if there was ever any kind of moisture coming down the wall like inside the wall or a leak or something or a leak by the window that comes down wall at least it's not going to get past this barrier here and onto here where it would go to your wood forth and then as you look over this way over this way here you see this adhesive tape that's on here so what we do is we start at the other end here and we'll put the next piece of the green underlayment coming across the floor here and it too will have one of these sticking out of the side and that will take right onto here so you'll but the two green pieces together here and then it'll tape right over here it'll stick this is a sticky adhesive here so that's how we tape them together you don't have to use a separate roll of tape with this like you do with the others okay so now before you run out to buy all your laminate flooring or your wood flooring there's three things you need to make sure of before you start before you even think about buying it number one the first thing you have to worry about is look at the environment of your room and does your room qualify for having wood flooring or laminate flooring installed into that room and we're going to show you momentarily how to check that out alright so here is another piece of laminate flooring right here one of the things you'll notice out of here is it's basically just a film that's on the top it's not even a veneer like you saw on the previous piece it's not even eight millimeters this is just a film on the top of MDF so this is about the cheapest form you can get I believe we this was like 159 per square foot when we got that that's not a project we did last year and here's another one here this is a little bit higher quality product that we had used a couple of years ago now this is bamboo veneer on the top and that's a 14 millimeter coating there on the top there so that layer of 14 millimeters thick is a lot higher quality and you have the MDF as well in the middle and then on the bottom you have plywood so this is probably one type of what they call engineered product it's an engineered hardwood others that we've used in the past will have this plywood on the bottom but it will criss cross each additional layer and so by binding together several layers at 90 degrees apart it makes it more resistant to expansion and shrinkage okay and then this is a solid piece here so this is this is a bamboo that I used before this was part of a flooring from bamboo a little slice that I cut off and you can see this is solid this was solid half-inch bamboo all the way through this is probably about the highest quality you can get for bamboo strand natural it has a Janka rating of about 2500 which is twice as hard as American red oak which is the toughest of the American woods so anyway yeah with the bamboo here you know solid piece all the way through and very high quality this was about 279 a square foot prepare to about 169 a square foot compared to 159 a square foot so there's your different types of wood these are just a few there's many more others but of your laminate flooring this is you know your basic type and what to look for to be able to use it on each one of your your floors here they'll usually be a chart on a sign there next to the product at the store telling you which type of flooring that you can use these on whether you use it enough on a ground floor or upper floor or what but that's that's very important that you make sure you're buying the right wood for which floor you're putting it on okay now before we start installing I just wanted to point out that you know this is a fifty two by six and a half inch plank here and the reason why we choose that length also is for strategy it's like playing pool you're always playing for position and by choosing a 52-inch piece you know most manufacturers tell you not to use a length of piece that's that's shorter than the width so in this case theoretically you wouldn't want to use a length of wood longer than six and a half inches here right but I think that's too short of a piece and so does the manufacturer because the manufacturer says not to use any piece of wood less than ten inches long so with this piece here this allows me to use five different lengths of wood which means that as I come across the floor and I start here that gives me five rows that I can have a different link before I have to repeat the pattern again so if you just buy those short little 36 inch pieces that would end like right here you're only allowed to use three different cut sizes which stinks because that means you're starting your pattern every three rows one two three one two three one two three okay and so you'll have a very planned looking stair step pattern going across your floor and that's not good so my rule of thumb is I try to go five rows before having to repeat a pattern so it won't be as noticeable and even then sometimes I'll cut a random length in the middle of here and yes I will have a butt cut you can have a butt cut every you know few rows if you want one and and that will allow you to create an even more random look that the whole strategy when you come into a floor and you look you should look across a floor and not be able to really notice any type of of pattern it should look very random and so if you take a look at this drawing here that I have for you that I've made here and this shows you what I'm talking about here's the three-step pattern here that that repeats every three rows and then followed by that as this one here you can see is the five-step pattern and so this is a lot better and then we improve upon the five-step pattern by every now and then making one change to one of the the pieces make it more of a random in-between size so that now will will change things up and you might use a few more pieces so it you can use all these pieces in a closet when you're done and then lastly you want to avoid the H pattern I see too many foolish installers professional installers even I've seen professional installers do this with tile the H pattern is horrible people don't do this do not be that guy but yet so many people do this pattern and you need to avoid this pattern like the plague it gets just that unless you really are a glutton for punishment and you have some kind of fetish and you really like this pattern but I would say avoid the H pattern at all costs and avoid the repetitive step pattern stair step pattern whenever you can all right so I always like to start off by characterizing my wall where I'm going to begin and I shoot a laser down and I just want to see how straight the wall is to my laser line does it bend in and out and you can see like right over there you can barely see the laser line let's see you can see it right here in the ground there yeah and it looks pretty straight but you can see some bowing the wall bows out a little bit in the middle down there and then you can see down if the other end there the laser is up against the wall see so you can see you kind of bows in and out a little bit what I also like to look for is the drywall being a little bit gapped up off the floor like that the reason why we like these gaps is put our our wood plank right up to it you know you just can put it right up to the edge here and that way it will expand underneath it too you don't want to stick it way under because you want to keep the nice width that you have of your plank here see but at least if you put it right there now your baseboard has a decent place to rest because remember they want you to keep the edge of your plank in this particular case 5/16 of an inch from the perimeter or what they call the wall so in this case the drywall is not our wall the wall is underneath it from the back there see underneath the drywall so you want to give it room to expand so I just back it up a little bit so that I'm my plank is now right under the drywall and that's why it's so important why we tell you to always buy a nice fancy tall and thick baseboard get the thickest you can get it's usually about a half-inch and the reason why you want to have fanch is because if you have a 5/8 5/16 inch gap here that the manufacturer wants you to have and then you put your baseboard on at least you know it'll it'll rest on top of it there some people make the mistake of doing this they think oh I have to leave a half-inch around the edge of the floor you know all the way around with my plank so then when it comes time to put your baseboard guess what happens the baseboard can fall behind your wood and that's not what you want you need to try to strike a happy balance where your wood is close enough to your drywall so that you can put your your baseboard right on top of it see like that that's why in our case were pretty lucky because now we can move the wood right here and when we will have no problem now the other wall we may have an issue where the problem here is that we have to sew our planks are going to go this way but you know you want to make sure you're within you know that's 5/16 right there okay so we can't put the wood underneath the drywall there's the drywall comes all the way down on the ground here so there's our spacing and then the baseboard will go here all right so let's start playing our planks now so as you can see we have cement floor here and we're on the second floor as you can tell by looking outside there so we have the best-case-scenario here we have a concrete floor that's reasonably flat and we're above grade so we don't have to worry about anything with moisture or any of that other kind of stuff there nothing to worry about being an at-grade now of course we're dealing with a cement floor but if you had a wood floor a wood subfloor under this you would have to make sure first that all your your wood sheets are rock-solid that that there's no squeaking you want to jump up and down all over the place on them and start screwing and maybe gluing some of them back in but you want to do some good work on your subfloor to make sure there's not too much play and guess what I've seen some really bad deals where they got the the trusses too far apart you know going down on the wood floor and then you would have to stiffen things up so that you wouldn't have too much flexion but we're dealing with concrete here today all right so now to put the second row of the underlayment down we you want to stretch out the overlapping liner here and then this is what they want me to do is to pull out this tape so this is an adhesive tape so we're going to pull this down the whole way down here and then stretch out the liner over the tape I'll show you like this and you just do this the whole way down the row there okay so now that all the underlayment is in place we're ready to start laying our first planks and I just wanted to point out to you I highly suggest you take your wood planks from different boxes and mix them together okay and the reason for that is all of the planks in one box might sort of be the same color line and when you put it together on the floor it could act up end up looking like a blotch of color that's the same shade and so it'll look not quite random so the best way to overcome that is you grab one from this box one from this box one from that box one from that box and so on we usually call from different boxes all over the place and that makes it a lot more random and that's what you're looking for everything you're doing you want it to look random you don't want it to look planned or you know in the case of the lines the your your lines between the boards and your stair step pattern you want to avoid that and you want to avoid blotches of the same color going down the line so let's get started okay so before we cut our first piece I wanted to just show you on our chop saw here the blade I use here is a t90 and that gives you about the finest cut you can get on wood flooring and so a lot of people always wonder what is the best size blade to use you know how many how many teeth should I have on my blade if I want to make a good cut a nice clean cut onto my laminate flooring or my wood flooring and so some people will say well t60 is good enough you know some of the manufacturers of the wood plank will tell you that some people will say t-80 but I like my t90 because it just gives you a perfectly ultra-thin curved nice perfect cut it's like butter and then we're going to be cutting along this line here so we always mark the line on the top of the wood and then you always want to cut from the top of the wood down through and that prevents you know sharding and getting sharp edges and stuff like that and another thing to remember is I always always hook a shop back up to my chop saw here so that when I make the cut the dust gets sucked into the vacuum you must do this otherwise you're gonna have dust from your you know sawdust all over the place and it will get sucked into your air conditioner filter as well and it will clog up your filter within a day and also it'll clog up your nose in your lungs and so you and you also want to wear a mask when you're making cuts here too so here's my vacuum I'm going to turn it on and make the cut [Music] see how that t90 blade just gives you an absolutely perfect cut and when you feel along the edge it's just nice and smooth and look at that nice sharp line here and be sure to dust off your board after you make the cut or you were going to be tracking dust all over the house okay so we have our first two pieces that we're just kind of putting into place here and we always use a installation kit this is a flooring installation kit and it comes with things like this black bracket here which we'll show you in a while that helps you tap boards back into place and it also comes with little tapping block here and we all have also got ourselves a much larger tapping block which we'll show you later why we have that and you also want to have a nice mallet and always get a white one not a black one and in fact they even make other mallets that are specifically made for flooring that have a soft more of a gelatin type rubber that you can use as well we prefer this one and I have a bar of wax here so sometimes we will rub backs down the length of our boards before we snap the new board in that just makes them glide in easier and snap down easier and helps prevent creaking and cracking of the boards and remember you always have to know what you're doing here so as we look at the end of the board here we know that we're gonna be mating up against this tile and that we're going to have a tea molding there now it's going to be a flexible tea mold that we have that's on order that'll be here in a couple of days but I have a piece of just regular wood timo to show you here how it works so the tea mold will go on and it has to push all the way against the tile to the left here so that you can see how it's see how it's all the way against the tile like that and then you have to leave an expansion underneath it between the end of the wood piece in the center of it where it's a tea so you see how so the board that you put down can't come all the way up against that Center tea gear it has to have a gap in there and that's how you set that gap in that distance and everything so that the tea mold is covering the board it'll still be over the board but there's room for the board to expand under it that 5/16 of an inch that you need that's why planning these in your cut on the end is so crucial this first row is always gonna take you probably a half hour to get just that part done by time you'll line everything up and once you get your first two or three rows down don't worry about exactly where they're positioned against the wall and whether they're all locked in and this and that yep because everything's going to shift around on you until you start getting more courses down the row here so typically what we do is we get our first three rows in then we try to snap them all in make sure they're all nice and tight and up against the wall where we want them and then we'll take a case of wood planks here and we'll put that wood flooring right on top of our three rows and that'll hold them steady until we get all the other ones and so once you get about five six rows down you don't have a problem anymore because then there's enough weight down on the floor to keep everything from sliding around okay and remember when these click lock into each other they're going to be perfectly aligned all the way straight down the line so the boards will determine the line not necessarily the wall so if the wall bows in and out you still have the straightness of your board to tell you am i straight or not so that's why you want to make sure they're all perfectly clicked in together here before you start trying to match it up against the wall with all these little black spacers here so these are the spacers here and what we do with the spacers they just provide that 5/16 inch that we need between the wall and the board this particular manufacturer wants us to put the tongue in first and leave the tail out because the next row will come in and it'll click lock into this we'll put it in and snap it down all right so with the first two boards now it's time to do this in peace and you go how do you do that what you don't measure you always eyeball everything according to the piece of wood being in place so here's how we're going to do this we know we need a piece that has to go from this edge of the board right here the edge of the laminate part not the edge of the board part but the edge of the laminate which is right here has to go from here to 5/16 inch away from the wall so how do we do that what you do is you take to your board and you flip it you don't spin it you just flip it end over end like this so now that it's upside-down right and now that it's upside-down you find where the wall is here and you come back 5/16 inches from the edge of the wall of course in our case we can go under the wall right here right so all we have to do now is mark on here where it lines up to there in that case it is about right there you see that so that's what we're making our mark and then you just translate that over to the top side of the board so we're going to do that right now ok so I flipped the board around and there's my mark so there's the full length of the piece that I'm going to make here I'm going to take this over to the chop saw and make my cut and the remaining piece here this will begin the second row this will be the first piece of the second row okay so we have that last piece in there 10 inches as it worked out exactly and so now we're coming back over here to put the remainder of that large piece that we cut that from is going to go over here and again we have to kind of work out here how to cut this piece at an angle here just like we did the first piece so that it will fit that a-team old dear so this is a good learning experience for you because you're probably not going to be running up against the situation you're probably gonna have a nice straight wall where you won't have to cut the beginning of the piece first okay so there's your first two pieces in it so now the next piece here is going to be a whole piece and he's gonna straddle the scene here between these two pieces here and so what we're going to do is you have to put the plank here and you got to stick it in into the tail so I have it just resting there just to show you how it's gonna go down here so I usually use my knee on the first row here to hold that down while I push down on this one you just got to give a little push down and again like I said until we give it a couple of taps and get a few rows going in here it's not always gonna immediately snap right down the tolerances on these are not always perfect either but you do want to make sure that you don't run into like this see sorry I created this little situation to show you here of what happens when the two pieces in the first row are not perfectly lined up these two have to be lined up so that there's no lippisch there so we'll pull this crack out I'll show you so that's why then Wyman is very critical you can barely see it right there there's about a sixteenth of an inch of lipid so we're gonna adjust the EC so that's why without having the benefit of the weight of all of these other rows behind you these first three rows take the longest and we're going to put some more spacers back here too to help out as well so here I've got the spacers right there and I'd like to put them right across the seam so that it supports both of them at the same time and it keeps them nice and even here so go to put your plank to cover across here right across that that seam you'll be just fine you know you remember I showed you earlier this longer tapping block this is why I use the longer ones because it allows me to put it right up against the side of the wood here your plank and then you just give it a couple of love taps and everything will tighten and for you notice how I don't put it up against the tail because the tail is likely to shatter but you're you know you're supposed to give it gentle taps anyway what I do is I come right up in here and I put it up against the edge of the veneered part so that I'm not hitting that MDF tail that is sticking out there okay so we gave it a few taps and now you can see the pieces laying down flat like it should be okay and you see why it was important that we did that no no smaller than a 10 inch piece at the end because as it comes down over here to be the next piece of the next row you can see how it gave us a nice distance here between these two cuts and that's what you want to see you never want to see your distance be less than the width of the plank always remember that as you're going across the floor okay and then moving on to the end of the second row here you can see because we have a narrow width and we're averaging about three pieces per for a row here we're gonna be making many more cuts more often than you would in a normal floor if we were going in the opposite direction so we have the third piece here at the end to make the cut and remember we're gonna need to cut that looks like maybe about 20 inches or so and remember how you do it you put your plank down as though it was in the spot that it's gonna be and you don't rotate it you flip it you flip it like this just like that okay so we're positioning our plank where it would line up near the edge of the wall and remember like I said we're going under the drywall because the drywall is up high enough if that wasn't the case I would be coming back 5/16 of an inch like that but here we're taking the up you got to remember when this flips back over this surface of the the underside of the plank is what's going to be up against the wall right here okay and then you come all the way back over here and mark the point where it would touch with the adjacent plank right so that point is right here so we're going ahead and make that cut all right so now that the last piece is put in on the second row the other half of that cut comes back up here now to form the third row and just like before we have to figure out how to this is gonna expand under the t-bolt so we have to start this point right there okay and that means we've drawn the line here to meet down at the other point over here and so you can see what we're trying to do is make the cut because the the tile is starting to curve now just tall floor is kind of curving this way so we have to maintain an even space in that channel there as we go along the curve so that's what we'll make okay so the beginning of the third row was now in and you can see what I did there so it's fitting nicely under the team old reference piece there leaving enough expansion there for the row one other thing too if you want to continue with production volume here going down the road make sure you always have a couple of pencils down on the floor on each end wherever you're going to be measuring you don't want to waste time crawling all over the place getting your one pencil that you have always have duplicate tools down here on the floor because the person on the floor should be on the floor the whole time and people around them should be off getting things or making cuts stuff like that I also wanted to point out to you you see how there's all this dust and stuff all over the the planks this is how they are right out of the box so I always use a cloth here to wipe it all down because you need to make sure that there's no flaws on your planks right so you want to keep it wipe down get all that dust off of there so you can see very clearly whether you have any flaws and if you find any flaws set the piece aside and maybe you can use it in a closet and also when you're laying wood flooring or laminate flooring down you see how you get a lot of these little crumbs and pieces of wood and stuff like that it's just unavoidable you don't want to leave these only you want to get them out of the way so every once in a while will come by with a vacuum in vacuum our area because you don't want one single speck of anything to be underneath your wood because it could be a potential source of creaking and cracking later on and a lot of times we found where a piece of wood won't snap into place and it was because it was a little chunk that fell off that we didn't see that was keeping it it was keeping it raised up just enough to keep it from locking into place so you're looking at the first three rows done and we've gone ahead and put two cases of flooring down and we put it down on the edge of the third row here so that it'll hold it down it can't lift up on you so now as we start the fourth fifth sixth seventh courses of the laminate planks going across the floor as part of our flooring installation here eventually the weight will will kick in and help weigh it down but we just need to get more rows of planks in so you're probably going to spend about an hour and a half or so just getting these first three rows done you're probably wondering oh wow I mean why was it that long believe me by time you fight and fight and control all these pieces together get the spacers in there and get them all snapped down and and then get the weights on them here that's a lot of fighting you're fighting for every little 16th and 32nd of an inch here and then ensuring that the planks are indeed snapped in and level you know flat they're laying flat they're not propped up in an angle all right so let's go along it gets finished with the rest of the floor all right so here's a situation you're going to run into from time to time so here's the last piece of the fourth row but look what happens at the end you're left with a sliver here that you would have to cut like basically a 2-inch piece and I just simply won't have any of that I never have liked this idea I see people do it all the time but I don't like this so what I want to do here and we're going to do what's called a butt joint so that means we have to make this piece shorter so we're gonna have to cut it you know somewhere back here so that we can put a longer piece in here now by doing that that means we're going to be cutting it straight across okay and we won't have the tail piece and if you don't have the tail piece that means the next piece won't be able to click down and lock into that side but that's fine because it will have the tongue and groove on this side and the tongue and groove on this side to hold it down and it's at the end and it's where nobody walks anyway none of it none of it really matters you're okay to have a butt joint as long as you don't repeat them more than about like once every five rows or so so now we have to decide what where do we want to cut it well we know we need at least a 10 inch piece here so maybe you would do a line here but you know what I've got a cut already right there in the first row so I don't want to make it look like there's some sort of a pattern there and so there's another cut over here on the second row so if you look there's a cut there and a cut there so I'm going to cut this board to the length that's like right in the middle of the two okay so I've put this new board in place see how it's shorter and it's in-between that cut there and it's in between that so it doesn't line up to anything your eye will not draw a line and connect the dots between any of them and it allows you now to make your that's about a 12 inch or so but joint and you can compare it to the original link that I had here so if you take stand up and take a look at the to see so that's what you would have been left with a little sliver and we instead cut it flat right there and we're putting a 12 inch piece there now because the piece that we're we're going to put here you won't have the other tab on it to be able to bring it over to start the fifth row so this will be the end of it for these four rows and we have to start the fifth row with a brand new piece and that's about what I try to do with our floors is every five rows we start a new course instead of having to do it every three rows so this this is one trick that allows you to continue that on and drag it on one more row under the fifth row here [Music] [Music] so here we are putting in our butt joint piece here and remember there's no tab where it's a restaurant so you just click it into the adjacent row there and when it comes down so you barely even see that there's you and here you can see we are progressing nicely across the floor they're almost done just have a probably seven or eight more rows to go okay so now we went down here we're getting ready to figure out how to get the wood under the door frame here I hate it when I see people try to come up against it like this but you're supposed to do this door frame off the door jamb here and that way we can go underneath it so what I always do is I always have a piece of my wood here okay you can see that the underlayment taped to the bottom of it so that the stack up shows exactly how thick it's going to be when it since that's the height that it's gonna be when it's on the floor so I bring it up to the bottom of the door jamb here and with my pencil I just mark the line and that's where I need to cut and I'll do it on the inside as well now there's two different ways you can make this cut here and these are my tools they're of choice I actually prefer this one this is a dedicated tool that's made just for cutting the bottom of the door gaps they call this an electric door jamb saw so you can see it's got this blade here and let me show you where to have it workshops of the blade is adjustable height and when you have this flat on the floor you're bringing your piece of wood right up to it and you need to set the height of the blade so that the top edge of the blade is just slightly ever so slightly higher than the top of the wood like that so once you have that set that's the proper height and then we'll just cut through the door jam and then you can stick your way through there just find you I want to cut it too high because you can't put back any material that you cut off so you got to make sure it's just right the first time the other method that I use and you see a lot of other people do is this is the oscillating tool this is my rockwell sonicrafter and it has a wood blade on it here so the way this works is you would turn this on and come over here and vibrates and oscillates if I'm taking about anywhere from thirty Seconds to a minute to clean through all of this and get that all cut problem is is it's not always perfect and it tends to want to smoke a lot they wants to burn the wood where is this one here this one spins at a very high rate and it slices through in about three or four seconds and then there's a port on here through your vacuum cleaner so it sucks up all the dust while you're doing it so let's go ahead and do that don't we have it marked here and I just want to bring my blade up to the market just see looks like it's perfect see you can see where the mark is on the door jamb there get started okay so before you start make sure you're wearing eyewear see that I got my hardware on here protection and now let's get started so we're going to turn the vacuum on first [Applause] okay so you saw how quick that was that was basically two or three seconds ultra fast ultra smooth perfect cut now we slide our wood piece under it and you can see it's just perfect height it's textbook you can't get any better than that folks and this is why I don't like using the manual hand saws that other people use I mean if you want to sit there and punish yourself taking five minutes or more to cut each one of these fine knock yourself out but we have eight of these to do in this house and at five minutes apiece there goes a better part of an hour just getting all of them cut and when you cut it with those hand sides you know your hand isn't always perfect at the right angle and everything and you get it all beat up and shoot up here at the bottom it's just a lot smoother when we use that saw there okay so let's do another one he's just right out just like the other one okay so now we're going to use the sonicrafter to cut this one and watch how how much longer it takes me to use this than it does that other door jambs saw that we just used a minute ago okay so that was a lot longer and I was closer to ten to fifteen seconds and keep in mind I still have to get tools in here and and get to the spots that the blade couldn't get to so here you can see I can just pull out pieces here but I still have to do the inside part of the jam here whereas the previous tool went around the corner it nails goes at one time so you know you can see it does take a considerable amount of time more and this tends to burn the wood and you can smell it too so the smoke comes up so I would also recommend you have a vacuum hose like laying close by when you're using the sonicrafter to cut through the bottom under the door jamb so let's see how it looks with our wood piece a little bit higher we're not always as accurate with that it's pretty close but and it doesn't cut it as clean as the door jamb saw it does either the other saw that I just used and I can set the height on that other blade and it will stay that way for all eight doors I don't have to measure I don't have to draw any lines on the bottom of the door jambs I can just walk right up to the other six or seven doors in this house and just start right on the bottom of it and be done all right so now as we get to the end of their wood floor here and we're gonna end up with a piece that's right here and then we'll figure out what what to cut and how big to make it here but now we have to start to think about what are we going to do about this transition and this is probably one of the worst scenarios that we've encountered for doing the transition because where I'm sitting right now is I'm on this carpet this is berber carpeting that's out on the patio so the patio used to be right here and then this was the living room and there's about a one inch drop-off so if this is just there's no pieces out there that will single-handedly cover this type of transition that we need here so what we have to do is I have a piece that comes close you can't use a carpet transition piece because this carpet is is below the floor or pretty much it's maybe right at the floor level but the shape of those those carpet transition pieces don't don't give you enough dimension to make that happen so what we have to do here and let me just kind of show you here this is the piece that I think that will work the best this is what we normally use at the this is a threshold piece that we normally use where the wood floors come up against a sliding glass door so apparently I don't know if they get sliding glass doors here at one time the previous owner converted this to a in a in a closed patio okay so you know that if you use this piece here we can't put it up against the edge of the wood like that you have to leave an expansion joint I'm gonna leave it about a half-inch like that and so that means your carpet over here we come around to this side here see how the carpeting is right there comes right up against it well eventually have to get a razor and cut this carpeting to be flat up against the side of that that piece there again but look what happens at the bottom of it see how we're still about a half inch off the floor there so what we're gonna have to do and we can't just glue it down like this at an angle that's not acceptable right there it has to be parallel to the top of the floor so you can see what's gonna happen here we're gonna have this big gap under the bottom so what we have to do is go get some metal strips from Home Depot and glue those down and then this will glue on top of those metal strips and that way we will be covering the floor like we're supposed to it will be up against the carpet it'll be up a little bit higher and yeah this is this is a potential issue with your toes but there's really nothing else you can do when you have a situation like this where you're about an inch or more drop-off from the from where you want to be see and not on top of that the other thing we have facing us here if you look here and a builder just gave such a poorly terminated cement structure their determination of their ledge from the living room in down to the patio level here it's really bad so we have a lot of stuff to fight here we may have to chisel away some of this but these are the things that you have to deal with that you're going to be faced with at the end of your flooring whenever you have two dissimilar types of flooring and even if this was wood flooring meeting up with what flooring this is still an inch lower than this so the other thing you could do is if you have all the equipment and the know-how is you could get a big piece of wood and just mill your own piece of wood that would be perfectly custom fit you can do that as well but we think that this piece will do just fine for us okay so here we are in the guest bedroom now and doing the same scenario as we did before we start the first row with one entire piece and then down at the end when we make the cut where we don't get an entire piece to fit that cut piece that comes down and starts the second row and so on and so you with this pattern you'll see each piece gets slightly bigger or slightly bigger slightly bigger until you reach a point at the end and you get to the end of this one where we would have had a sliver and just like I'm on the living room what we did was instead of cutting a sliver we cut this piece this longer piece a little bit short so that we could fit in a butt piece that was about six inches and that's about my my minimum length is no no smaller than the width of the plank now the manufacturer here tells us to do 10 inches and so we can have one piece out of the entire floor that isn't going to be 10 inches that's fine so then that's as many as we can get that's as far as you can do your pattern has ended right there with that piece so now you come back and you start on the sixth row here and you start with the same long piece that you started on the first row so our pattern repeats every five rows as opposed to probably every three or four rows when you use other shorter planks so we're going to start the sixth row right here and in just a minute we're going to show you how we're gonna cut around this corner here and just want it to point out also you see how we have that box of planks sitting right there you use that at the first three rows and you know now that we're extended out a few rows there's enough weight that is holding these boards down that we don't really need to have that there anymore so you can keep pulling this forward towards you and start peeling the planks out of there to use it as you're putting down going down the rows alright so here we are now where we've cut the small piece at the end of this row here and he's right there and we've taken his remainder and we're ready to put him right down here but here's where you have a problem now because now you're at a transition in the wall and so what some people do is this is the cheap way here where they'll just put the piece here and continue on the course and they'll start the other piece down here along the wall there and but they'll end up with a shorter piece here that just has a a little bit of a butt joint right here and I prefer not to have a butt joint in a spot like this where people are potentially going to be walking all over the place all the time so you have two different dimensions acting on you at once you have you have to determine what needs to go down this way and then you have to determine what needs to go from this last tile right here this row so we need to figure out you know how far out do we want to come and I'll show you where the problem lies you can't just start right there up against that wall and say well that's what we're gonna start the course because when we put this piece down here and just sort of line it up with that first one and if you do that you can see you would be left with a gap in here if I remove this board out you'll be left with a gap so it's it's never gonna reach these previous courses so what do you do then what is the missing puzzle piece well it turns out this is our missing puzzle piece so we're not going to use this piece but we are going to use the width of this piece and we're going to make it an l-shaped piece so we have to get another piece of wood and cut it here so this brings up another dilemma for us because now if we put this full-length piece here and you know cut it to fit on this corner and be the same length here then the problem is is we'll have a butt joint right in that little spot there so you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't so the safest course for us at this point here then is to go ahead and leave this piece here as is this shorter piece right here and we'll go ahead and just have to have a butt joint will have a we'll have that piece start down there and we'll get another piece that comes and fills in this space here and it'll just be a small 3-inch wide butt joint right there and also we have to rip this piece and we have to rip this piece here because he is set in this way so the piece really only needs to come out this far from the wall so we have to very carefully make sure we measure and cut lengthwise down that piece of wood to make sure everything lines up here so let's go ahead and do that now alright so I have these two pieces cut to length and you can see where these two are going to put up now so now the only thing you would do from this point on would be to rip these two pieces you have to take it off of the wall side of it all the way down until this lines up to here so this is one method of doing it but I of course prefer the other method better if you don't have the skill to make the cut that we need to go around this corner then this would be a method that you could use on your wood floor and really it's only a problem if it's a problem for you it's whatever your preference is okay so here's my preferred method of doing this and we're going to start with a whole brand new full-length piece this full-length piece will latch on at the end of this guy he'll click right on there like that right and then all we have to do is when he gets to the wall there we have to make that cut there we'll have to cut out this section right here away from the wall and give it enough clearance so that this part of it everything can slide up so that he can click right on to that other piece right there so you can see whatever size that gap is right there that's about how much we have to remove off of the wall side of this plank here and then once we remove it off of this one we'll have to rip that whole piece right there to that dimension so let's go ahead and cut this piece here well we'll figure out the measurements and then we'll cut it okay so the best way to accomplish this measurement is we've put the piece in the low that we're already attached here and then you can see right here I made a mark about 5/16 of an inch away from the wall there so what we'll do is cut along this way here like this down this piece and then we'll get to a certain point here where we go this way so let's find that point all right so I put the piece back and this is the point we're looking for right here so we can be like what the other boards are 5/16 of an inch away from the wall I'm going to mark this with tape so we can see what we're talking about all right so with the board in place there this area right here inside the corner of that blue tape there that's the area that has to get cut out and that's a tricky cut to do so what we do is we will start with the wood like this vertical on the chop saw and we'll come down and hit a few these here and knock some of them out up to about this point here and then we'll see this end here through our table saw and just slice all the way down here until we hit that blank pointer okay so here we are at the chop saw and I'll show you how we do this first part of the cut always put your safety glasses on [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so there's our cuts right there and all we have to do now is just kind of get these out of there and chisel it flat and we're gonna be just fine and then we can run this through the table saw lengthwise down the tape [Music] [Music] okay so there is our chiseled out hole there and you know some of these little tricks that you see us seasoned people do with the there's a little dangerous so just make sure you know what you're doing and you're very very careful with you attempt anything like that alternatively if you don't want to use that maneuver that that we just used to cut these out here you can use a chisel to you know once you peel out those little pieces there then you can just chisel them out there so now to cut lengthwise I'm gonna put my plank right here on the table saw it's going to go up against the fence as I push it through and there's the blade will line up with my tape mark that I made and we'll cut the blade we'll push it all the way through right up into the hole here and it'll stop right there okay so we're going to show you [Music] [Music] [Music] well here's our piece this is our beautiful piece that we just cut here and now we're going to test it out and see got a nice 90 degree cut see that's a nice trick that we do here so we're gonna put those would like right here well for this piece right here that's gonna go by the door you see we can't just rip it all the way down because part of it has to shut in and take up this space right here by the door so we've taped it off here how it's gonna look when we're done cutting it so let's get this over to the saw and get that cut alright so on the chop saw I've got this one started and I just have to cut that with the table saw and then on this side of it I got this open here and I'm going to rip this on the table saw as well and then this part here is the part that goes under the door [Music] [Music] I always lower the blade after right time now here we you know you're supposed to have two big shield over and everything but just for the clarity of this video I have removed that shield so you could see exactly how the cut was being done okay so here's the piece that goes under the door it's been 20 minutes so far and we've already made five cuts out of this piece and we still have one more to make because you see how we're still not quite there yet in terms of the width there well we didn't make a mistake cutting you can see that has to still go in the problem is is because of here so now the last piece that we have to cut is we have to rip this little section off of this part that sticks into the doorway and so you can see there where it's supposed to end so we will go ahead and mark and make this one last cut and be done with it all right so there we cut off that extra little piece there that was about almost 3/4 of an inch now we should have our final cut here this should be nice and ready to go okay so our door piece is finally cut and it's in place and this happens a lot too because 9 times out of 10 you're gonna find yourself with a cheapy door frame like this this is what the builders do they give you these cheap door frames that are half-inch on this side and then they shrivel down to 1/8 inch here so now you have this hole here and what we normally do is we'll cut a small piece of wood and stick it under there before we put this piece in we'll put them both in together and glue it together and it'll be down here and they'll fill in that crack there and you'll never really notice it this is what I hate about these cheapy door frames that the builders put in normally what I do with my door molding I get it's flat across the front and fluted all the way up and flat half inch thick so you don't normally run into these things here but or sometimes you're at the mercy at what somebody else did leading up to it and then the team oils will go across it like team old reference peace leaders to help us figure out and when when we go to cut the team old we'll have to notch out here in order for it to fit all the way up against the the wall here at the edge of this doorframe and want to do the same thing on the other side as well so you can see here what a pain on the budget is when you have to start cutting around corners and doing ripping on these planks because these two planks right here just cost us about an hour of work and you would think a lot doesn't look like about man all the figuring out an engineering you got to do and this one was six cuts that it took to get this piece here right because you have to cut this way and then that way and then this way and then that way and then you have to cut this thing twice you you're putting it in and seeing where it fits and it's a real pain so let's hook these up and see how it looks alright so here's our two pieces again and you can see it starts down under the door there and comes all the way along the wall and runs along here so it looks like everything's fine now right or is it houston we have a problem so every time in construction folks this happens a lot every time you fix one thing you break something else and you see the problem anybody see the problem here with our wood floor if you look at where our plank ends it ends basically a half an inch or so I'm making about an inch away from the previous edge of that the adjacent plank and you can't have that you you really want to be six to ten inches minimum away from that so what do you do in this case here well the fix is actually pretty simple what we have to do is go back to this row here right before and we just got to change these pieces here now so what I will probably do is start right here with a full length plank that'll probably take me right to here and then we'll be fine and then we can start doing our runs up the rows again yeah and so here's often where you pay the price with does to you so here we have a straight wall but you can see the donor made this doorframe going this way a little bit it goes back as you go to the left so they put the doorframe on crooked and so you can see what it does have it gets wider and wider there and so we need to put two good-sized pieces of wood in there because really on this end here the board can't go any closer to the wall you need to have that space there you're supposed to have that breathing space the manufacturer wants you to have a minimum of 5/16 breathing space there so this board is strength because we know the whole rest of the floor is straight over there then it's just this one spot from this part of the doorframe to here that goes crooked so these are little engineering disasters you're going to run into as well during your projects you can see our cuts came out really nice we went around the corner there right you turn the corner there with it right and then went straight up towards the bathroom door there and went under the bathroom door and over another corner here so these were the pieces that together took about an hour or so to get them all cut perfectly and so now we're free to continue all the way back up the road here and you recall we had to adjust this row here because this plank came right up against the the other cut so we started by putting a previous what we did three rows earlier we started with a whole plank so we did this three rows earlier right over here there's three rows one two three and normally we don't like to repeat on the third row we normally with our patterns and the way we do our cuts we try to get five rows but we simply had no other choice and but now that it changes and goes all the way down and starts over here we're probably going to be adding more staggered joints here as well coming up the the rope so it's not going to be the same pattern as it was over here the minute you start adding length to the floor you're gonna get a different randomised pattern so this will work out just fine for us so as we examine our handiwork here if you found this video useful we'd appreciate if you would give us a thumbs up down below here you see you can do the thumbs up and also if you like this video you can subscribe now while it's fresh on your mind in that way you can come back later and binge watch all of our videos we have videos every week that we come out with and as soon as you click on that subscribe button be sure to hit the bell icon next to it so that it will alert you every time we produce a new video alright so now we're going to start the next row here and you can see here we're progressing nicely across the bedroom here now this is as good a time as any to remind you folks that don't throw all the stuff into the trash either these boxes when you're done your flooring boxes cut them up into smaller sizes like this and recycle them this is all perfectly recyclable cardboard even the papers the instructions that come with them the Flyers and everything that are in there those are all recyclable as well so don't throw anything in the trash other than the plastic only the plastic that in cases these boxes should be put into the trash ok so here we are on the last row of our little hallway here and I wanted to use this little piece here so that all we got to do is just have it go on the corner like that and then we'll have to notch it here so that it can go right up here to finish up this last little piece here then we'll have a straight edge here and then we can put a long piece that goes along here because as it happens here we're almost kind of full width here we'll just have to maybe shave off eighth of an inch off of any of the other planks down here in front of the closet tract there but so in addition to making that notch there we may also have to cut what we would cut it on that side but it has to be ripped so that it's not as wide as it is right now we have to rip it to accommodate you know and to fit in that space there so let's go ahead and measure that up okay so the way I like to do it is I just took the piece put it in place wherever I can and then we come over here to the wall we got to come off 5/16 off the wall cuz that's the clearance that we need and I'm making my mark there so now we know at least for the part that goes in here how wide it has to be and then what we do is we know if you look over here in this closest senator he's right over the track and so we're gonna have to shave a little bit off of that as well so we got to mark that too so let me mark that so I got him marked so we have to shave that off also okay so now I have the wood piece pretty much right where it's gonna be over to the right so now I come over to this corner of the wall and I make a little mark on there about 5/16 away from the wall because that's the clearance that this part needs in order to go that way all right so that's what the parts going to look like this right here is what's going to be cut out and removed from the piece so that this can now slide under there so that's another sort of tricky corner piece there and then we have a full-length piece here that we're going to put next to it and he has no problem fitting lengthwise but his problem is with wise he'll also need to get cut so the cuff that it's going to get will be a rip along the long end along that back there so let's figure out how much it's gonna need well this is an almost miracle here because you can see there's the edge of the track and it really just all you got to do I think is we just need to rip off the lip we're just going to shave the lip down at the very edge here to this nice straight edge right along where my finger is and that should be enough to make this piece fit in there all right so now we know what we have to do with this long piece the next long piece has a little bit more of a difficult cut but we do these all the time and we'll show you how to do this is this fairly simple so what we're going to do here is this piece has to wrap around this wall just a little stub of a wall right here so that it can lay flat so you can see we have we haven't sort of sitting where it's gonna go here and then we would rest on top of the plank next to it where they were interlocked together let me show you that a little better there see and when you look above the wall now see it just has to notch around it so we're going to make our mark right here about 5/16 past the wall and then on the other side over here about 5/16 past the wall and then we have to figure out how deep to cut the little pocket hole here right so to figure out how deep to make that little pocket hole I've put this piece of blue tape here and I'm gonna just mark it 5/16 of an inch in front of the wall okay and then we'll just transfer this line back over to the board okay so here's what it's going to look like we're going to notch this part here out of the board we can't do any of that with the table saw and you can't plunge cut it with your chop saw either so we're gonna do it similar to some of the other pieces we did earlier where we're just gonna keep will put this vertical here like this on the chop saw and we'll keep plunging this way making several cuts with the chop saw until we get several tiny little pieces sticking up and we just pull them all out we'll chisel along the bottom and make a nice smooth pocket cut there so we're going to go and make those three cuts that little one this guy here and this one here and then once we clear this wall it's like home free all the way down the rest of the wall there we won't have to make any more cuts until possibly when we get to the very end and under the door [Music] well so I have the smaller piece cut here and you could see there it is nice and perfect and I've already put it in place out there and drive fitted it and I we see that this right here is the correct width so now we're going to use this piece as the reference to set the width for our fence here on the table saw so that I know how to cut the other two pieces so see the way you do it is like this you stick it up against the kerf of the blade there so you're right on the edge of that blade and then you bring the other piece of fence right up against it and that's how you know that when I cut the other two pieces they'll come out the same so I just locked down the fence so now it's not moving anywhere and when we run the pieces through they'll all come all three will end up being the same width once they're cut that's all you got to do okay so I have our long piece here that I'm now going to cut just that little bit off of it and you want to make sure folks that you know which side you're cutting this with these wood planks you know with all of the laminate flooring both sides tend to look quite the same except one side is the tongue and the other side is the tail and the tail often looks like the Tom on these so you don't want to put this thing in 180 degrees out of phase and cut the wrong side [Music] [Music] all right so we have our piece all slot it up there and all we're gonna do is just get a little here screwdrivers and stuff and pry these off and once we get them broken we'll go ahead and file across the bottom with our chisel alright so we have our three pieces of laminate flooring here our cut is the two long ones and then here is the short one let's see how they fit so I'll put this guy in first here and see how he fits in just perfectly there and we're gonna leave about an eighth of an inch in front of the track here and that's fine because you've only got a few rows here it won't expand that much and later on if you decide you want to fill in the crack you could probably put some caulk just right along the top there to fill in the crack just for a visual there and the wood will still be able to expand your wood flooring can expand back and forth through the caulk there all right so that piece is in and let's try the next piece okay so he goes in pretty nicely there too and this last piece sitting this one was the trickier one because it has to go around that little wall there so let's see how what he did it looks like he fits in pretty good and here we are our three cut pieces are in perfectly so now we can continue unabated down the rows here and let me just point out something here to you when I ripped down this plank here it's important that you only cut that part because this side over here still needs to have that tab there okay so you want to make sure you only cut off the part that needs to fit up against that track for the closet door there and you can see here we're making great progress in the guest bedroom here we've completed those difficult cuts all in there and we've just got a few more rows to go here to complete this room okay so now what we do in these last two rows here is because we can't get the hammer on the other side of our tapping block to get at it what we do is we use this tapping bracket here and we always put a cloth down to protect the floor and I'll stick the bracket right on here like this so here's the view from above so the whole idea is instead of trying to tap it from over here the bracket gives you a chance to tap it from back here instead and that folks is what we always do on the last two rows of our limit at flooring and always remember to use that cloth because if you don't your bracket here will scuff up your wood floor ok we've reached that point where we're at the last row here and there's a couple of different ways you can do this what I've done is I first of all I always like to have the piece that's right up at the door be longer than the door so we're going with a full length piece here that you can see I've got it sitting right here and I've already ripped it down about a half inch off so that it'll sit near the wall dirt and everything and what we're going to do is we're going to tap it from the left side there and make it go all the way over here to the right look like my time it gets over to here so here's another piece here it's shorter pieces but time it gets over here you'll be about an inch or so more than by nature so away from that tile right there now of course the Builder ended the tile on the wrong spot he brought it almost an inch past the door jamb and then on top of that look at this they gave us almost a two inch tall door so this is way way any tile and flooring anyway so any chance you thought you were gonna have behind the the seam is gone they're gonna see the seam all right so this is our t moment piece that was going to go there but a tile in the wood floor there so as long as we leave enough room for expansion and remember this piece hasn't been ripped down like this 1/2 so there will be plenty of room I think we have to be along this line right here so we're gonna tap the piece down and over now luckily because of the width of and the way everything worked out here we can get by with just a single rectangular piece here we might have some issue here at the bottom of the door jamb now as you recall with the bathroom door earlier we actually cut it out to go up that way to meet up near the tile and if you had to do that in this case you really wouldn't be able to lay the wood piece down like this and have it go down because of all of the blockages so what we normally do in a case like that is we remove this piece here and you just take a utility knife right along the edge and cut through all of the caulk right there and then you just pull the piece off and you do the same thing on the other piece so now that there's nothing blocking you'd be able to put your piece in and it would go down because you don't have that there blocking it okay we don't have to do that in this case but we have done that in the past all right so I'm in it later we've tapped it into place and it lines up with everything else in the corner there okay and should be about an inch and a half gap or so between the tile and the wood there the only thing that might be a little bit of an issue for us here is this wood with this little open space here where we might want to fill it with some wood and another solution to fill that gap might be when we get the tea mold put in maybe we can kind of notch it around and make it fit in there or maybe we can put some putty in there and stain it there's a couple of different ideas you can do there to fill in that crack here's another idea see I just put this little piece of wood in there right there to see that so that can fill in that crack too so that now once you put in the the team mold you won't see it and we've started to put the wood flooring here into the master bedroom it's looking gorgeous now here's another cut we're going to make here and of course just our luck you know we thought we would have enough that the courses of the wood planks would make it so that we could just scoot right by this wall but nope look at this we missed it by about a half inch or so see there so we have to make a cut to cut around this little wall stub here so very similar to the one we did in the closet on the guest bedroom there so we're going to have a piece of wood here like this and you can see I've already got it taped off so that when it when cut it to fit around the wall so that it will still be able to clip onto here and then it will continue on down towards the other wall here in our bathroom mirror now we'll have to put down another plank that goes on this side of the board and that plank will have to get ripped because you can see according to that depth there that is not the full width of a plank there and is narrower by a few inches so we'll run this these two pieces that go here are going to have to go through the table saw and we'll slice them such that they'll be about a quarter of an inch or so away from the wall the bottom of the that's the kick panel there so we might even do it about eighth of an inch because this hallway little area right here is only about three three and a half feet wide so we can get get it really close and then when we get our long fashio piece of thin plywood that goes over the front there the decorative piece it will rest on top of that gap and cover that gap so you'll never know what's there okay now in terms of making this cut here on our chop saw what we're gonna do is make a series of slices that just go all here and by time we're done cutting it's gonna look like the tines of a fork and then we just take our tools and rip the pieces off and you'll be left with a bunch of jagged edges right here on the bottom and we'll very carefully run it through the chop saw we'll drive the saw across the bottom there to smooth it out you can also use a chisel and a hammer but it's a lot easier to do it on the chop saw if you're very careful [Music] [Music] alright so there we are completed you're just gonna rip all of these off and then put it back on the chop saw to smooth off the bottom edge and we'll have a nice perfect cut so here's what it looks like with all of the pieces removed and now we're just gonna put this right back on the chop saw and smooth it out all right so here's our piece all finished the putt is there it's okay if you have jagged edges because all of this is going to be covered by baseboard so I just want to do a quick dry fit here before we put some more underlayment down and you can see textbook so the baseboard will go right here and cover all of this nicely for us okay and now here's another situation you'll run into from time to time and that always is the problem as sometimes getting under these door jams but with all of these pieces that need to come together down at the end here you can see we can't quite get them to line up because the door jamb is forcing them to come flat and you can't come in at an angle and then rotate them down so in because there's so many of them that we're having a problem with here and after spending in a half hour it doesn't seem to want to budge we could spend more time and make it work but I want to show you a different solution here that we've used before too and we're going to remove this door jamb piece here this molding so all we have to do is use all we have to do right here is we're just take our utility knife and we just we're just gonna start up at the top of the door and just go down like that and score the caulk all the way down and then we'll be able to pull this off now it is Brad nailed on and you will have two Brad nail it back on okay unless you can get it to stay with caulk and we'll probably have to call this cut through the cul con this side here because we know that there is caulk here as well too so it's only a few minutes to take this off and then we'll have full range of motion that we need here on these planks to get them all connected together okay so we pulled it off we pulled off the door molding I look at this this is we see this a lot this is so ridiculous look at the size of that now you're putting a piece of half-inch molding on you don't need a big old two and a half inch structure of nail do that you're supposed to use Brad nails that's why sometimes these things are almost destructive pulling them off luckily we got this off in one piece also you can see they were very inconsistent so here they used a big blonde nail here they used a brad nail little nail here big nail over here so all right now we can have free rein to get our pieces put together and you can see after about only 30 seconds or so I was able to get all of these pieces hooked together so it's amazing when you remove one stupid little encumbrance there how you're able to get things done and then over here up against the where it meets the tile and in the bathroom we're fitting it now with the dry mold the team old see that tea mold right there so you got to leave room underneath it for the wood to expand in and out of that team old piece there and so that's what we want to line up all of our pieces now they all want to end up right in line with the end of this piece here so we've got probably two or three more rows to go here so this is looking really good and we'll put this molding piece back up when we go to do the baseboards we'll do all of that at the same time Brad nail them and caulk them so here we can see the master bedroom is coming along nicely now we've got it about half done it's getting late so we have to leave and we'll come in tomorrow clean up this whole side and we'll have all of these done and cut hopefully by the end of tomorrow so this right here what you're looking at was about maybe six and a half hours worth of work total for one person so I was unable to have anybody work with me the last couple of days so I just did this part myself and the cuts here are what really slowed you down all these little cuts you have to do to go around the door gm's and the walls and stuff like that but we're moving along so if you found this video useful hey we would appreciate if you give us a thumbs up down below by clicking on the thumbs up icon and you can also subscribe to this channel down below so that you can come back later and binge watch many of our other useful videos that we've put up for you that will solve many engineering issues around your house and for all of you DIY remodelers plenty of stuff every week and that's it for this video of folks and we will see you on the next one

Channel: jeffostroff

Views: 101,086

Rating: 4.7801609 out of 5

Keywords: Laminate Floor Installation, how to install laminate, how to install wood floor, how to install wood floor on concrete, how to install wood floor planks, how to install wood flooring on cement, how to install flooring, how to install laminate floor planks, laminate flooring, laminate flooring installation, how to install hardwood flooring, how to install laminate flooring

Id: wtTyxH8wk3o

Length: 110min 35sec (6635 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018