How to Install Lifeproof Vinyl Flooring

[Applause] hey everybody welcome back i'm jason bendt and today uh i'm going to be branching out into the andmore portion of my channel for the first time really so this video i'm going to be explaining how you go about installing the lifeproof vinyl flooring from home depot this is not a sponsored video i bought all the flooring it's just something that i've been doing a lot in my house because we recently moved into this home in february no april yeah we moved here in april um and we've been doing a lot of renovations and there's a lot of stuff that i think would be really helpful to share with you guys so i'm going to but before we get into that i just want to apologize the lighting is not the best this is the first time i've been shooting in the house obviously i don't have the great lights that i have out in the shop so i'll try to do my best and then the audio you probably hear quite a bit of an echo well that's because there's nothing in the room so there's nothing absorbing that sound but we'll go ahead and get through it i'm just going to kind of walk you step by step how you go about installing this click together vinyl flooring super super easy and i've done it myself in multiple rooms in the house now and so i just figured i'd take this opportunity to show you guys how to do it so let's get started so i want to first start out by just showing you a couple of the things that i'm going to be using throughout this process and that i found work very well first thing which to me i think is the most important is some sort of knee protection because you're going to be down on all fours for an extended period of time i've used both knee pads and i've also used these these are just these things called slides you basically use them for working out you can like put your hands on them and slide different places to do core workouts anyways these work really good because they slide around very easily and they're padded and cushioned so i'll be using those the next thing is just a standard hammer comes in pretty handy a dead blow mallet this is just a inexpensive east wing one from one of the home stores i've got some green tape or you could use blue tape or masking tape or whatever you want i'll show you what i use that for my tape measure some sort of blade knife this is going to be used to cut the flooring i've got a sharpie or something to mark with and then some sort of t-square and you'd see that in the thing this is just a woodpecker's ts-12 it's one i use for woodworking um but this acts as a straight edge when i am cutting uh fish different sheets of vinyl flooring and then this is an example of some of the flooring and so this is some that's left over from previous flooring installs and i always keep some and even if i didn't have any i would definitely take a piece out of the box that i got and cut a few pieces up and so this one i'll show you when i cut my pieces what i use this one for again just to cut off scrap and i have two smaller pieces that i cut down and more importantly you'll see this again in a second i don't know if it's gonna focus there you go you see how that has that pointed edge that's the edge that i want to use you don't have to use that edge but this will make sense once i get into it but just two small pieces like that because one of them will wear out by the time you get to the end and these are going to be used to basically hit the pieces into each other to make sure that they lock together and then lastly this is just a little 12-inch pry bar this is just a cobalt one uh really inexpensive i bought this and uh this works really really good and i'll show you what i use this for when we get to that point uh going back to these real quick so they do make these little plastic blocks that you can get that's actually for doing what i'm going to use these for two things one i couldn't find it and two it's an unnecessary expense when i can just take scraps and do the exact same thing and it's really really easy so let's go ahead and get started and i'll kind of talk you through what i did for the room to prep it to start installing the flooring so the first thing that i did to the room is i came in and i started to rip out all the carpet and to rip out the carpet i just cut it up into manageable sections and then just pulled it out very easily rolled it all up and got it out of the room after i got all the carpet out of the room i went through and peeled out all of the padding that goes underneath the carpet after that i went around the exterior of the room removing all of the tack strips then i went ahead and removed all the baseboards because they will get adjusted because i didn't want to use quarter round by putting in the vinyl flooring it will actually bring it down a little bit and the only way to fill that gap would be with quarter round or replacing the molding so we're going to go ahead and replace those base boards now and then i go around and make sure that i get everything swept up and everything really really nice and clean and make sure that there's no debris underneath okay so when you walk in my room this is the far back left corner and so i want to lay my flooring out across this direction and work my way from the back wall all the way up to the door and the closet because i'll just have to worry about cutting everything out around different things at the end as opposed to the beginning so what we're going to do is i'm going to walk you through how to get this first row laid down then when we get to the second row i'm going to kind of talk about how it clicks into the other piece and how you go about doing it and then i'm just going to go through the entire process and as i hit different points that i think things are valuable to share i will share those so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to use some of the pieces out of the box each box is about 20 square feet worth of coverage and i think like seven panels come in each box i want to stand these up against the wall so you're supposed to have about a quarter of an inch gap from the wall what i have found works really well is just taking a couple of these taping them to the wall just to stop it from going underneath the drywall and so we're going to do that but here's what i use the hammer for obviously i want to make sure that there's nothing inhibiting it but right here i've got a couple of brad nails from the baseboard so i want to make sure i remove those because i need these to sit flat against the wall and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take that first one place it nice and tight against the wall and it doesn't have to be right in the corner it's really just to stop any piece from going in and then i'm going to take some of this tape and i'm just going to tape it so it stays upright and again these will come off and i'll actually use these on the flooring for the room this is a lot easier than trying to manage uh small little spacers that you can get because as soon as you knock one of these boards into it they just fall down and it's a huge pain in the butt so this is a technique that i find works really really well and once you get about five or six rows down and you get some weight to the flooring these don't even have to stay up just enough to hold it in place and if it's sticking out a little bit at the bottom like most drywall it's not going to be straight that's fine because as you push it it's going to push it in nice and tight so go ahead we'll get that on i'll probably do maybe two more along this back wall and i'll do one right here in the corner for the same reason because i don't want it to get pushed under this way as well okay so there's two sides to each one of these panels on this side you have that piece uh the very tiny little gray lip that i showed you that i'm going to use for my other pieces and then you have this opposite side where there's the very prominent gray portion where you can actually see where it locks in well i want that to be facing away from the wall because my next piece is going to click in to this portion so i've got my one section back against the wall and go ahead and push it back tight to the corner bring those spacers and that's all you have to do for your first uh piece and now i'm going to go ahead and click in my second piece to the first and before we go any further something i want to mention is your concrete right depending on what kind of subflooring you have i have concrete one of the steps is you want to make sure that it's all flat there's no debris if there's any major cracks you go and fix that now mine is nice and flat nothing alarming or nothing significant but that's not the purpose of this video and there's some other great videos out there that talk about how you can go about fixing it if you have something wrong with your concrete but since i don't i can't show you guys so uh we're gonna go ahead and continue on with the flooring install now what we're gonna do is if i show you the bottom of this you'll see this has a protruding gray portion and there's a little lip here and that lip fits in to this notch here and again i want to make sure that my dominant protruding edge is facing towards me right now at this point since i'm going uh towards the wall instead of working from the other direction so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna get this board nice and level or nice and straight and you can see that this is sticking up from this piece and all i have to do to get this in at this point is take my dead blow mallet and get that nice and fully seated and then i'm just going to feel a spot and now it's nice and smooth this piece is now attached to this piece and that's all you do until you get all the way to the end all right so i'm going to go ahead and set down my third plank and i am not even wide enough to do three full planks so what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut this plank and right here is where i need to cut it but remember this end needs to click into that so i'm obviously not going to cut it there i have to cut the length on the other end [Music] to make sure it fits so there's a few different ways that you can do this so the first thing that i need to do is i'm going to turn this to where the portion i need facing towards me is actually going to be facing towards the wall and i still want the top because the bottom is black and you're going to have a hard time seeing any markings that you do this is the end that's going to get cut off right we don't need this portion so i'm going to slide this down towards the wall and get it nice and close and then i'm going to look right down here and this is where i'm going to use my marker and i'm going to mark where this needs to be cut i just use my sharpie i'm going to mark that section the other technique that you can do which just takes more time is you just use the tape measure figure out how long it needs to be take your tape measure put it on the board mark your line cut it out but just by flipping this over it's just really really simple to get a quick reference the the biggest thing you need to make sure you remember is to reverse this so you're cutting off the end that you need to cut off so i'm going to cut off this end and then now it will fit once i put it in the proper way so now i'm going to show you real quick how to go about actually cutting this okay so to cut each one of your pieces um this is going to be kind of a difficult example to show you because it's it's when you're closer to the edge it's a lot more difficult to break it but we'll still get it done this is where that extra piece came in and this is really just to catch the blade from going down and dinging the concrete and one thing is you want to make sure that you have a relatively sharp knife because that'll help this process quite a bit so this is where the t-square comes into play so i can take my t-square put it right on that line and then i'm just going to start making cuts and the first one i always just go kind of light to get that nice line and i'm not shifting my t-square and i'm just going to make multiple passes and you can hear my blade is going into this other piece instead of coming off and hitting the concrete and when you have a piece that's so close to the end like this it's really important that you try to get as nice and clean and deep of a cut as possible because it will make it easier to break otherwise these tiny little end pieces are a little challenging now another technique you could use is just a miter saw if you had a miter saw that is mobile and in the room with you i can make really quick work of it okay so now we have a prominent cut and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn this over and you're just going to crack it back it's all you're going to do just like that now i have the piece that's hanging on with the underlayment this is a good time to talk about this typically flooring you want to have some sort of underlayment everything is built into this so you literally remove everything from your floor and then you can just install this directly over it i'm going to take my blade just cut through that material pull it off and now my piece is ready to be installed so now we'll go ahead and get our last piece put on here all right i've got my proper spacing down on the end and now we're going to go ahead and start doing the second row all right so normally what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to take your cut off from the other end and you start your next row however unfortunately this is just too small to do that right we don't want to start with a piece that's only two inches wide so plenty of things you can do here uh luckily for me i have all my scraps from my previous um flooring installed jobs so i have one right here that will work and this is what gives you the random line pattern and so by doing this i know that when i get to the end i should have a cut off that i can come back and use to start the next row and you would just continue to do that over and over again and eventually it will repeat itself so for this all i'm going to do is i'm just going to start off with this piece and this piece slides see how i have it at an angle it's because this little tiny lip fits in and underneath that piece there so i can take this and slide it down and it's in contact so i'm just going to push it all the way down to the end i'm going to drop it down and this is where this comes into play and so this is how i'm going to ensure that it's tapped together and is seated properly and i'm just holding this up at a slight angle and i'm hammering it making sure that the seam closes up looks like right here one good tap and we're good to go and so now i have my second piece in and ready to install my next full piece and this is where the process can start to become very quick and i cannot stress enough just how easy this flooring install is so now what i'm going to do is i have two areas that i need to go into i have this this back row and then i also have this so i always start on the long portion first slide it down and drop it down the first thing i'm going to do lock in the end to end portion then i'm going to take my block give that a nice tap and now i will follow this exact same step to do all of the flooring and then when we get to the doorways and everything like that i'll bring you in for some tips in those sections [Music] now that i have some better lighting i wanted to bring you guys in closer to show you what i was talking about before so as you can see these are the protruding parts that have a little trench in them and these are the places where this thin portion that i've been using to hammer everything in fits in so it goes in like this and then it drops straight down and that's the locking action so in the beginning i was explaining that back portion rests in the piece and you can slide it left or right like you see here i have my piece up at an angle so what you're doing is to install this next piece i'm sliding it down to where it's touching and then i'm going to drop it down and notice how this one is higher than this one so this is where you're going to hammer it down so now that's nice and level and then there's a slight gap right here and so i'm going to zoom in and show you as i'm using my piece with a mallet to push this into the other board and how it's going to close up that seam you should be able to see on camera i don't know if you can see it perfectly but there's a nice little seam here and we need to get this back so it's nice and tight against that so i'm going to use my block probably one blow with a mallet and it's gone there's no more seam you almost can't even tell where the two pieces meet minus you know obviously the change in the the grain but that's just a better look of what i was referring to in the beginning got you in handheld mode here for just a second so it's not going to be super clean but i just wanted to show you now that we got about half the room done the difference that you see and where the planks start and that natural change in the length so right here we got a short one middle length one almost a full length one and we've got a full length one right here so it naturally works away it works its way out and then obviously you see the different color and stuff and they're all random [Music] in the boxes but each one of the boxes is pretty much the same so it ends up working real nice let me get some better color so so far so good and now i can probably go ahead and take those off and start using them but i'm going to go ahead and get up to the doorways and then that's when i'll give you guys some more pointers and tips on what to do when you get to those all right so now we've come up to uh what's going to be potentially an issue right because i need to get this under the door jam and this happens fairly frequently as you can see the people that built the house when they were putting in the other flooring you can see down here they actually cut part of that out already but um it's a little bit close for comfort so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take that scrap piece that i used to cut into and then i'm going to take this reversing back saw and what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut into this using this as my guide so it's obviously going to cut just a little bit above that so everything will fit real nice it'll be a very small gap and i'm just going to cut it back and then that way the new piece will fit in there just fine another tool that you can use is a multi-tool which is what i would prefer to use however i don't have one with me so this is what i'm going to be using [Music] get that cleaned out but now you can see my board will slide under just fine and give me the little gap that i need for my transition which here i will not be installing a transition yet because we still have not replaced the flooring in the bathroom so this will just stay like this until we place the flooring but now i have easy access right underneath and one of the last steps that i'll do in this room is repaint the trim so if i have any cuts or anything like that you get taken care of all right so now is where things can start to get a little bit tricky and that's when you have to start working around molding so the best way that i've found to do this is i'm going to take the full length and i'm going to slide it all the way over to where it's touching the board that it's going to be connecting into so let's push it all the way up push it over and so now i know that this is where my board is going to sit and so the first mark that i want to make is going to be a mark that's going to be the notch that gets taken out this way what i want to do is i want to cut so this is still going to be underneath this molding right here so i'm going to cut right there and so that's my first mark that i need to make then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my board and i'm going to put it to where it is almost touching here obviously we have that little ridge so i can't get it all the way in but that's fine and i want to apply the same principle so i want to make my mark right around here and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to draw this and a straight line out here and i'm going to come down with this line here and this is going to be the section that i cut out now to transfer these lines first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to come up and i want to get the measurement for this line just so i don't go way past it because i am using a permanent marker so this is going to be 11 and 3 8. so i want to scribe this line to 11 and 3 8 all the way back now i can take my t-square and just scribe this line down to that point and this is the section that i will be cutting out so this will fit around this corner so how do you cut this out well there's a million ways that you can cut it out and i'm not here to tell you which way is best i'll probably just go in and use a band saw a jigsaw anything you want this is all going to be concealed you're not going to see it so it's really not going to be that big of an issue i'm going to go cut it out i'll bring it back in we'll fit it in place and then i will show you another tip because once you start getting close to the walls like this you obviously can't bash the piece in so i'm going to show you how i go about doing that all right so once the piece is cut i'm going to slide it down in and so one of the key aspects to this flooring is that you're able to turn it up you know at an angle to get these things underneath well you can't always do that especially here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get this over to where i'm touching that next board i'm going to double check everything make sure that there's no visible cuts everything looks really really good and so the first thing that i want to do is pound down the end to lock that edge in place and then this is where this tool comes in very very handy and what i'm going to do with this is i'm going to put it against the wall you need a lot of leverage to get this to basically force itself underneath and lock in place and so by using this pry bar and just lifting up if you heard that click that was the click of this locking in and so now what i can do is use the block just like i would for anything else and hit in the rest of this a couple of good blows with the mallet and everything closes up nice and tight and so that is how you make your cuts around the different molding and you can still get a nice tight seam by following those steps so now i'm just going to finish up this small portion of the closet and we'll be all done so as you can see we've got the flooring all installed uh just took a few hours and that was with filming so it's really not a difficult process i think this is the fourth room that i've done this in now and obviously i'm by no means an expert when it comes to installing flooring it's just after going through the process multiple times there's a lot of really useful things that i learned and i wanted to share that with you guys so i hope you found the information helpful and if you want to see more videos uh like this please let me know down in the comment section below one of the things with moving into a new house is doing a lot of renovation stuff um and changing over rooms and we saw furniture and stuff that we need to build for this room and other rooms in the house and so this is all just kind of part of it as always everybody i really appreciate you taking the time to watch if you want to find out more about who i am and what all i do head over to my website benswoodworking.com and you can find all kinds of information there that's going to do it for this video until next time get out in the shop try something new and i'll see in the next video thanks

Channel: Bent's Woodworking & More

Views: 172,553

Rating: 4.8791814 out of 5

Keywords: vinyl flooring, install vinyl flooring, how to install vinyl flooring, flooring, flooring install, flooring installation, how to install flooring, lifeproof, lifeproof flooring, how to install life proof flooring, home renovation, home renovation ideas, diy, diy flooring

Id: JMf2WXO15rg

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020