How to Install Laminate Flooring | Easy Step By Step Instructions

today I'm at my buddy John's house and we're gonna install a floating floor I'm gonna show you how to do it right now boom so this is the room and we're gonna do this is the floor we're gonna do the snap-together type with the pad on the back side they sell stuff where you can just do the floor and then put the pad on underneath but this stuff makes it easier so first thing we want to do is and John's already got this going want to take the carpet out or whatever you have and take all the tack strips off and basically get the floor clean take all the staples out all these little staples that they do it seems take those out and we're gonna get this floor ready and then we're gonna start on this wall here and then work our way back one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they put this floor down is they put it tight tight to the wall and the reason you don't want to do that is because this is a floating floor and it's gonna move with humidity and temperature changes so when it expands if it's tightened to that wall and it's tight to that wall what could happen is these seams are going to get tighter and tighter and it's gonna have nowhere to go except up and then they could potentially pop out of each other and then you just have loose floor and just hanging around so you don't want to do that and in order to cover that gap because we're gonna leave a gap on the wall we're gonna go around and take off all this old baseboard and then put it back down when we're done the alternative to that is you can put it to the baseboard put the floor to the baseboard and then get some molding to cover that gap but since we want to avoid spending more money and cutting new molding and everything and putting it down we're just gonna try and reuse this stuff so you can go along the top here cut through the old paint and the old caulking just so you don't mess up the wall too much I remember going to have new flooring here so it's going to raise the baseboard so it'll cover this a little bit and then you can peel the baseboard off see that's where you have to cut it so try and cut all that caulking and paint off so you can avoid that take carefully these pieces off and you can reuse them [Music] on this wall here this is the longest wall in the room and the doorway to the room is right there so if you're here to be easy that way before we start we're going to check the rubber swear so I promise we're here and just gonna put it in the corner and just get an idea this is a really small square but if your walls are way out you're gonna be able to tell right off of that that looks pretty good and this just straight line I just want to see if the walls go in and out as you go down this way so I'm gonna take a tape measure and Mark on one end of the wall this flooring I think is six and a half inches I'm going to just mark 7 make a mark right there and then I'll go on this side like the same 7 inches I'm gonna give this John he's gonna go to that end and hold the chalk line hold on that same mark now watch seven inches down here I'm just gonna go down the wall you can see that's just about seven a little more it's simin so what I'm looking for is let's say this was more like six inches that would mean the wall is starting to bow out this way so the only thing you would have to figure out is if you have to cut on each end if you have to rip these pieces of flooring down but if it's even or pretty even then you're good to go all right so most snap-together flooring is very similar where you have the tongue right here and you have a groove on this side so what you want to the way you want to install it is I'm starting here so I'm going to install the tongue towards the wall the other tongue goes into the groove a lot easier than if you did it like this then you have to go under and it's just not that great also that makes it so this end is up against the wall and then this end you can easily put the other piece into this end that makes sense so you're putting in the small side yep here that's against the wall yep okay and then same with this side this is sort of the small side in this one yep it's going up against the wall yeah get easy things that's how you make sense yeah so I got our first couple pieces started here what I like to do is cut these little pieces of wood and I can use them as a spacer against the wall because you want to have a space like I was saying before for it to expand and contract so once you put these here you're able to push it up against the wall and you can do it over here too if you wanted you want to make sure that these are gonna be tight so you take a scrap piece of wood and then we're not gonna hit against this we want to hit against this edge because it's more solid so you take a scrap piece of wood and then let's say okay if you look here you get a gap then take your piece of wood and watch the gap right there as you hammer it sits down when you do your starter pieces you want to make sure that you stagger your seams and what I mean by that is this is one scene so the pieces this long and then the next piece that I put down overlap that and that seam is going to be right here and when you put this another piece in I stay away from just filling every other because then these seams are going to line up you basically want the pattern to look random so I want my seem to be about here it doesn't have to be perfect all kind of piece it 14 inches so again you measure from here 14 inches and just to show you a Sharpie shows up a lot better on this stuff the only thing you want to be careful of is sometimes when you make this mark and you cut it and you put it in you can still see the mark and pencils a lot easier to clean off than Sharpie is but this one should be fine because it'll be down here why do you want to stagger this views the reason you want to stagger the seams is because if you look at the floor once it's all done you're going to be able to tell that there's a line that goes like this and it just looks it just doesn't look natural this way if you do it like this it looks almost like a hardwood floor where it's all very random so now when you put a piece that you want put this piece in here and you lock it in this way there's two ways you can do this you can either take your entire row say this is the row and you can lock this piece in right here and then lock your entire Roman and drop it in to the row that's already here or you can take this piece like this and make sure there's nothing in the cracks get it as tight as you can over here and then if you kind of wiggle it and push it'll basically sit in there so we're gonna get started and now you have a big gap right here and you have a spacer down here you can go to this end and then same thing right here just tap it in the place this one might take more force than the other pieces all right so if you do move the floor when you start it out the first couple of rows are the hardest to get to like kind of stay even with the spacers and everything if you do push it too much one way or the other you can just kind of move the entire thing and realign it as you go so this piece when I put this in here door jamb so we're going to undercut that instead of flying around the trim we're gonna undercut this so you can use an undercut handsaw for this I prefer this tool I believe it's called the oscillating tool this is the an awesome tool to have so just put a piece of floor right here and you're going to cut this even to that [Music] Florin wait a minute lock that in and then since I can't go take the wall and go as even as I can like this now I'm going to cut the last piece in the row so I'm gonna measure from the wall again to this finished edge right here and I'm gonna take off about an eighth or a quarter of an inch so I'm gonna go like this and I'm gonna cut this at 31 just so I have some space there this last piece is gonna go here and as far as doors go usually you want to leave the floor halfway under the door and that's where your transition will be between rooms they're gonna continue this flooring into the hallway so I'm just gonna leave it right here and then they can continue it into the hallway [Music] [Music] you should just drop these in and push them tight where you wanted to go but if there was a gap here and you want to make sure these were tight you can take a pry bar or a flat bar and pry it against here and just give it a giving a pry push that forth way that way so I go over there and lightly push the floor back this way if I wanted to just align everything back up like this and then come back here all right we got our first rope started we know that we want to stagger our seams so we'll cut those nice and random to start we don't have to cut our end pieces and we can go down now I'll show you quick little trick here if you take a scrap piece of this stuff and a couple scrap pieces put this one like this and this one like this and then another one like this and sandwich them I'm gonna make a block that I can hammer against this piece right here will go in the groove and I can hammer on it and it won't damage this right here and this will last a lot longer than any of these pieces as you can see they get messed up so I want to sandwich these together and then take some screws and screw this way and flip it over and screw on the back side too [Music] all right they have a nice block that you can hammer with get these pieces tight [Music] [Music] [Music] and now this piece and let the closet which gets a little tricky but it turns out that I lucked out here because this piece is gonna go right here like this so I think the next piece is just gonna go right under here i undercut this all the lake let's jam to make it easier and I can carry this throw this way and then on the back sides of this yeah I'm gonna keep going over the floor this way and then on the back side I'm just gonna tuck that tongue under the other flooring and snap it in that way and just hammer it into place and then continue it this way and then I'll have to do some notching and whatever we can to get around this door jamb [Music] looks like I lucked out again I don't have to notch this this is the reason why I cut this entire jam and not just this piece of button up here and cut this entire thing out and this entire thing so now I can just like this under there and I can hold this tight here this together [Music] [Music] okay home stretch the closets all done it is mixing tape had a little trouble with these spacers because the sheetrock is higher than the floor so what that means is long as you get everything tight this still has a place to go if it expands it can go under this sheet rock so that's fine just some of these seams let's go under and then some have gaps but again as long as it has room to move you're good and basically the takeaway is just make sure everything is tight sure all your seams are tight so they'll pop out eventually so I'm gonna move everything clean all this up and finish this out and then they'll all the baseboard back on [Music] [Music] all right floor is done what do you think job okay cool so check out my other videos wait there I'm right here that one right there right here that's subscribed already thanks for watching boom no you got left out uh paint the baseboard right okay we agreed you were gonna do that alright I guess I'm gonna paint the base boy

Channel: The Fixer

Views: 390,180

Keywords: laminate flooring, how to install laminate, installing laminate flooring, laminate flooring installation, laminate floor installation, laminate flooring tips and tricks, how to install laminate flooring, how to install a laminate floating flooring, flooring, how to install floating floor, snap together flooring installation, flooring installation, floating floor, diy, how to, do it yourself, home improvement, floating floor installation, the fixer

Id: h5OWyqpMEq0

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 18 2019