How to install vinyl plank flooring in multiple rooms or whole floor.

Walt how to's and reviews today I'm going to show you how to install vinyl plank flooring onto your floor I'm making this video because when I did and I watched a bunch of videos and I felt like there was a lot of important information lacking like for instance what if it's not just a rectangular room what if you're doing hallways with multiple rooms and all has to come together where is the best place to start and what's the reasoning behind that and what's the math to know you know how big of a strip to start with and where to start all that kind of stuff is gonna be coming up so stay tuned feel free to use the timeline to skip ahead but again I'm kind of making this from hey if I would have watched this video before I did it wouldn't help me do it in the most efficient manner but also giving that professional look like a pro came in here and did it and I think I figured out all of those tips and tricks and I'm gonna give them all of you right now I'm gonna cover everything that you absolutely need and then I'll go over some optional stuff and explain why it's optional and how you can get away without using it but you know if you've got the extra tools lying around you're definitely gonna want to use them now obviously you're gonna need actual flooring and in some cases you might need an underlayment and I can make a whole video on which ones to go with and the pros and cons just on that so you can do your research there cool so first thing is you're gonna need spacers for the outer edges now most of the kids and stuff have this kind of spacer but to be honest for a vinyl plank flooring these suck do not get these if you have a tea style type it's gonna make the install way easier and better so you can just put it on your vinyl plank line it up there and it just saves a lot of time of taping okay so you're gonna need some kind of pole bar and it doesn't have to be big it doesn't have to be fancy cheap little ones that come in a kit it's gonna work it's gonna be fine the idea is when you get up close to an edge you can't use your your mouth and handle to hammer that back edge because there's a wall there so you just have to be able to throw this guy on that edge there and then you can use your hammer over here it just moves where you're hammering from here here you need something to be able to do it yeah absolutely gonna need it so these things come together a strong here and you need to like really push them with a good amount of force to get them to actually lock and stay together now the reason you don't want to just hammer on the edge is when you hammer on the edge you're gonna break the locking mechanism so the next board can't lock in so they have little blocks that work well and then when you're actually like walking into place I would take this big block a lot of times like I said my hand that would be enough but sometimes a little stubborn so I put it almost like an angle like that so that it's just pushing up against there and then just traps in there so the next thing is you're going to need a way to camera these in now you probably could get away with just a rubber mallet these are like five or six bucks for these edge seams where the two boards come together on the end use smooth because you're actually here you don't want to hit it with a hard metal piece that's a really small surface area because you might actually dent the plastic vinyl so this just gets the job done definitely need a measuring tape you're gonna need some kind of way to mark on your vinyl floor when you're doing intricate cuts you know where you're gonna make it cuts so a pencil works good for that here's something that's optional that I find to be way easier you can use a sharpie and depending on the color of your floor since you know I like black and white kind of going on I used a red sharpie to make all my marks all my cuts now you might be thinking oh my gosh you're crazy using a red sharpie but alcohol and a paper towel will actually wipe that up I'm talking even months afterwards it'll work and it's much easier to see much easier to write with the next thing you'll need to make your cuts and I guess you could argue could use a saw every time but really this is using a razor blade it's a real big time-saver and you definitely want to use it most people operate something now the rest of the stuff you can argue is optional and I'm going to explain why you can argue it's optional but also why it's important and why you probably want to use it now you need to go to your doorframe and it depends you know you might be in the situation where he removed old flooring and you've got plenty of space to fit stuff under the door that was actually my situation so I didn't have to cut any of the door jams the bottom of them so that I could get the vinyl plank underneath there however if you already have tile and you're not gonna remove the tile you're just gonna put the vinyl plank over it and it's already flushed with the tile you're gonna have to cut out a small piece of your doorframe so that you can slide the vinyl plank under there and make it look nice put the vinyl down on the door flame make your mark or just leave it there if you have a tool and just cut in there so you know hey it's gonna slide right underneath but you could use something as cheap as a little hacksaw and I'll put some links in the description and it's just gonna take more time you get like all the cuts that are possible with this guy and unless you're doing like a perfectly square room and somehow the door frames like not gonna be an issue for you to wear it just worked out to where you don't really even make anything other than just straight cuts you might get away with this and you can actually do all the cuts with a jigsaw I think these are like 50 to 70 bucks but definitely get some more blades if you're gonna be making all your cuts with this I mean if you're ripping boards I mean it's a long board and you're cutting it the long ways with a jigsaw it's gonna work just take your time but you'll probably want to pick up a couple blades because they will start to get dull if you're doing a lot of cuts like that now obviously if you happen to have a table saw use that to make your grips gonna make your life and job way easier and if you have you know circular saw a chop saw those all come in handy when needed but a lot of times you're making longer cuts boom and then if you've got weird things like intricate door jamb cuts or just the different things that are gonna come off this is gonna be the tool of choice that I would almost argue that you need this but what's nice is this is the only saw that you're gonna absolutely mean the other saws aren't necessary they're just gonna make it a little easier and quicker that's all now I definitely think you should remove the baseboards and the biggest reasoning is just something nice homes I don't see a little cord around hiding the edges because they put down you know hardwood mile plank and you know crowbar a flathead screwdriver a paint 501 or like you know plaster scraper are all gonna be handy you're gonna cut the Culkin with your razor blade you're gonna want to be able to get behind there so you get some leverage you're gonna need something thin to be able to get in there and if you don't have something like that I would just get the baseboard remover because you know though the wider it is the more it's gonna pull the whole board back versus just one little section might be used just a crowbar it's gonna make the tendency to break your trim so trying to go really slow take your time suppose if you're gonna put a trim back on you know don't break the trim a drill is something that I would definitely recommend a lot of times the wall isn't straight so you're actually gonna want to create a straight line on the floor by using the anchor method that I showed and you're gonna need a drill and screws to take your little piece and drill it in so that that piece can't move all right as shown here now unfortunately if it is the situation like me and you're actually working on a concrete slab instead of a wooden floor you're gonna need a special kind of drill which is called a hammer until I got this one of Home Depot's I think it was the cheapest one there's why I got it because I'm not gonna use it much but it was about 50 60 bucks and you need a concrete drill bit because if you try to use a concrete drill bit and not a hammer till I mean it's not gonna work you're gonna be there for hours and half the screws probably won't even stick and then you're gonna need special concrete screws to be able to hold those in so again that is optional because you can get away without doing it you could argue that you don't need a square because they say keep like a quarter-inch distance off the wall and I bet you know you can even use anything straight and you know you could just use it as that straight and you can probably eyeball it and get a nice cut there and you'll probably be alright so you don't use square but if you have eet's we're sitting around their square it just makes me slap it on the vinyl you've got a nice perfectly straight line break out your razor blade it just makes a lot easier okay now here's something that's totally unnecessary well I find super helpful for a lot of jobs and I'm sure if you're you know a frame or something you're pulling laughs like that's not a tool belt but it what I'm using it for is just pockets because but you'll find when you have all this stuff you've got all these different things your pockets get filled pretty quick you've got all these spacers if you have some kind of little cheap tool belt or even a nice one you know load up a couple pockets with spacers have your Sharpie in the same spot of everything ready to go and you'll find it makes the job way more efficient because if you're like me you know you get going and then it's like wait where did I put the razor blade where'd I put my marker where did I put this and I spend you know so much time just looking for my tools but I try to just when I'm doing a project get in the habit put everything in the same spot it's all on me it makes me way more efficient but again it completely unnecessary alright last thing that's unnecessary that's super helpful is knee pads all right you don't need them you're fine you're gonna be on your knees a lot though hammering in and stuff and you know if you're doing a really small room and you'll probably be fine if you're gonna be doing a while these are gonna make you a lot more comfortable step 1 obviously you have to get the rooms ready to install the flooring on since it's the floor if it's possible removing everything that's on the floor per room is gonna make your job a lot easier there's different kinds of flooring you might currently have if you have a laminate or linoleum like this where if you have tile like this it is possible to put the vinyl plank flooring over that I would just double check with your manufacturer's instructions and it's gonna be a lot easier than removing something like tile just keep in mind you know when you transition from one room to another the flooring might not be level and you'll have to use like a reducer transition which may not be optimal for what you're actually wanting just keep that in mind before you proceed if you have carpet you're definitely going to need to remove that as well as the padding and the tacking strips along the edging before you put down the at flooring just take a razor blade cut up the carpet into strips roll them up and do the same thing with the padding for the tacking along the edges a crowbar and a hammer works really well just make sure to wear eye safety the wood chips and nails tend to fling up towards your face the next step is going to be removing the baseboards it is possible not to remove them and you can just put more trim on the bottom like a quarter round but unless you do that to your whole house it's not gonna match and I've never seen that in really nice modern high-end homes I just don't think it looks professional and clean so for me gotta remove the baseboards the two most important things when removing the baseboards is be sure not to break them go slow take your time the other thing is it's almost impossible to put them back in the same order where they're supposed to be if you don't label them so make sure you use some kind of labeling system like B for bedroom K for kitchen and I would work in a clockwork fashion from a doorframe labeling b1 b2 b3 some way that you know how am I gonna put this back together take a little time now to save a lot of time later you might notice in the video I didn't label my baseboards and I broke them it's because I was planning on replacing them because my wife's lovely cat peed along the edges of the rooms as you can see her on the carpet so for me I had to replace all the baseboards because that was just disgusting the next step is you need to make sure your floor is level the best and easiest way to do this is to get something really long and straight such as Eyebeam level or a box level lay it down on your floor and make sure that it lays flat everywhere now if it doesn't you're gonna want to address that and there are whole long videos that will explain how to level a floor so I didn't want to cover that however vinyl plank flooring it's a hard surface when you walk on it but it's also a flexible flooring so if you put it over a screw that's popping up you're gonna feel that with your foot when you walk over it now I took care of the big stuff like that drain plug and some areas that were really unlevel with my floor however I didn't do the entire floor and I can say first hand if you don't it is gonna be noticeable and you will feel it well other people notice it that's debatable but I can show you there are a couple places on my floor like right here where the end seam actually pops up because I didn't self level the floor so it's a very important step I figured because I was laying down a cork underlayment it would be just enough cushion to help hide those in discrepancies but as I just mentioned I can definitely tell the floor isn't level and if I could do it over again I would have taken the extra time to level it the next step is to determine whether or not you need to put down an underlayment some vinyl plank flooring will actually come with one pre-installed on the backside and just follow the manufacturer's instructions depending on which substrate you're covering and what products you're using if you need to put down an underlayment there's a bunch of different options you can use now in my basement I had high radon gas readings so I wanted to put down something that would help prevent that gas creeping up from my concrete floor that's why I went with 2 and this first one is just a thin 6 mil polyethylene plastic to help keep that radon gas from creeping up the second one I chose was in a roll and it was a quark material that's gonna have three things it's gonna help dampen noise it's gonna give a little bit of cushion and it's water-resistant your underlayment is either gonna come in a roll or fold it up in an accordion like fashion like this now the roll when you lay it down the edges are gonna want to come up so if you have something heavy to put there it'll definitely help with the install I also found that especially for the edges duct tape seem to hold it down the best if you do use the type that's folded up like this it will make your install quicker and easier now you're ready to determine which way you're gonna lay your floor but before you do that I wanted to show you a really helpful tool I put this link in the description but this is a really helpful website if you come down here to open room visualizer and then you click on this button here you just need to upload a picture of the room or floor you're trying to install your vinyl plank flooring on and then it looks like I already did it so it has it here doesn't take very long it uploads the picture I was really surprised you did a really good job of picking up where the floor is I'm putting it on there for you you can test out you know how do you like different color I just found this to be super helpful the biggest thing that's gonna be the most help in my opinion is this rotate surface so you can see these boards are going vertical and then we click that and now they're gonna be going horizontal so it can really help you visualize what is gonna look the most aesthetically pleasing to you and there's just no substitute to being actually able to see it and visualize it here is a mock-up of my basement when determining which way to lay the floor really beauty is in the eye of the beholder so it's totally up to you and there is no absolute truth on what's the right or wrong way to do this however with that being said one day this house is probably gonna be for sale even if it isn't for a hundred years one day it most likely will be and if you're trying to make it as valuable as possible if you lay it down a way that's most aesthetically pleasing to the masses it will be more desirable therefore making it higher demand and increasing its value so with that being said I wanted to give you some guidelines and couple pointers that a lot of people will say when they're talking about what's the best way to lay the floor so the first thing I wanted to say is which wall is the longest and when they say while they're talking about an exterior wall that can be completely connected so in this case this wall right here running this way is actually longer than the wall that goes across the bottom here so therefore according to that model the best way to run your boards is gonna be this way okay now along those same lines another thing is the longest line of sight so in this case if you're standing here and you look down this way you can see that's only four foot long and you actually hit a wall right here so you could argue the line of sight if you're standing here and looking down this way is longer however if you keep looking you'll find that the actual longest line of sight is if you stand here and look down this way through this door that's gonna be your longest line of sight and since this is a stairway up to the upstairs you can actually stand at the top of the stairs and look all the way down to this back wall and in that case the longest line of sight happens to be the same as the longest exterior wall so it's making my decision a lot easier plus just the fact that I think it would look best this way you can see how this is all tying in so a couple other things to consider is the point of entry into the room the floor or the home so if we're only doing one room in this case and you were to walk through this door the point of entry to have them parallel the boards would be going this way if you're doing the main floor of your home when you walk through your door if you have line of sight all the way to the back wall and you have like a hallway there a lot of times people will recommend laying the boards down that way however if we pretend that this spot right here is the front door you walk in and boom you hit a wall in that case it wouldn't be recommended the way that we enter this floor from the upstairs is coming down the stairs and the point of entry if we lay them down parallel now we're three for three on the longest wall longest line of sight and point of entry the last thing I'll talk about is the lighting let's pretend that this office is a big living room and this whole back wall is just a bunch of windows and the Sun sets or Rises over here so when it's coming up or coming down the Sun there's lots of beams of light coming through these windows a lot of times people will recommend having those boards go parallel to the lines now this is a basement there are there is a window here here here and back over here so it's 5050 and since it's a basement there isn't a ton of light and that really doesn't come into play but I did want to mention that because you will hear that now there is one other option that really isn't available when you're installing vinyl plank flooring and that's because it has a tongue and groove locking mechanism the long way of this room we could put it this way in the hallway we could put them down this way wooden floor like real wood you don't need a transition piece and it is possible to to do that to have them going opposite directions in my opinion though I just don't like that look to just have it all of a sudden right here switch directions and furthermore if you're using vinyl plank flooring because of that locking tongue and groove mechanism where the end of the board has to go into another board and lock you can't actually do that without putting a transitions piece there and having musician pieces in between the rooms it's raised up so you're gonna stub your toe it's just an obstacle that's in the way if you are trying to push something across the floor or mop it it's a place for dirt and dust to collect and I just don't think it looks aesthetically pleasing so when you're talking about vinyl plank flooring or just any kind of flooring you don't want to have transitions and you don't want to have it go one way in one area and a different way in another area you need to lay down the flooring all the way for the entire floor of that particular home so longest line of sight longest wall and point of entry is all telling me to lay my boards down this way and I definitely do think that was the most aesthetically pleasing when I use the visualizer and check things out so that's the way I'm gonna run it the next step is to determine which corner you're gonna start and finish in when you're installing vinyl plank flooring you install it like you would read a book meaning you're gonna start in the top left-hand corner and you're gonna finish in the bottom right-hand corner the reason for that is when you lay down a board the end of the board is gonna connect to the next board with a locking mechanism and it's gonna connect better if you do it from left to right as opposed to right to left there might be some different vinyl plank flooring out but for most of them that's how it's gonna be so when we're looking at my diagram here since we know we're gonna be installing this direction there are two places to start right here and then we'll be installing like this and work our way all the way down until we finish here or we can start here and start installing and then work our way down till we finish here now it really doesn't matter which way you do it but the biggest thing you want to do is limit how much you need to work backwards and I'll show you what I mean by that if we were to start here in this mudroom we're gonna install flooring here then here then here work our way down until we get to this doorway then we'll install a board that goes all the way here but all of this area has not been installed so now we're gonna have to lay boards and work our way backwards up here the other option is you start laying another board here in hope that these are the exact same size and that by the time you end up here this board connects which is very dangerous and a lot of times and even if you're off by a sixteenth of an inch it's gonna make a big difference this wall might not be perfectly straight it's just really difficult so the safest way if you are gonna do it that way is to work your way backwards the alternative is if we start in this corner we start installing boards and then we go them through this hallway we come here and then we have some boards there and then you can go down and you can finish here and then you can keep coming down here and finish here so we only have to work backwards that little area right there let me give you another example to help you visualize this let's say you're installing and you decide to install your boards the long ways this way now if we were to start here and start installing boards you can see your work your way down you get all the way to this hallway and you install one long board there and you go through here now you have to work backwards all through these rooms here which is a lot of working backwards and you don't want to do that now let's look at the alternative if we were to start in this corner and installing boards and then you're gonna have to work backwards up this way a little bit but once you get that one board there you can continue working your way down and you're gonna have to work backwards here and you're gonna have to work backwards they're much much less working backwards all right so let's imagine for a second that this is how wide our boards are and they're really not this wide this is just for demonstration purposes and if we start laying in the top left corner of the gym room and we put that first board down you can see by the time we get to the right side of the gym room we have a very little sliver left of a board and we want to avoid that especially when it's just a rectangular room so they're gonna say cut that first board now we've got half a board at the beginning and half a board at the end of the gym which is gonna look a lot more aesthetically pleasing but you'll notice when you're doing an entire floor now at the beginning of the office we have a little sliver to start and a really big board at the end of the office so when you're doing multiple rooms you can't always have it equal and not have a little sliver somewhere so what you want to do is determine what is the most important areas to avoid that now when you're considering that in a lot of rooms like if you look at this picture of my office all the edges are actually covered up by furniture and in most situations the hallways are never covered up by furniture or it's a very limited amount of furniture furthermore it's not gonna be that noticeable in a really big room and your eye isn't gonna be drawn to the edges of the room to be looking for that however in a narrow hallway if that happens you're really gonna notice it if there's a little sliver on one side it's gonna be much more noticeable and it's gonna draw your eye there again going to the value what the masses are gonna say what the majority of people are gonna find aesthetically pleasing is if you have the best scenario in the hallway so we only have one hallway and obviously the hallway that is perpendicular to these lines is gonna be fine but when we're looking at this hallway you can see we can have one big board there or we can have a half a but we want to avoid having a little sliver on one side and a big board on the other side so that's the next thing you need to determine is which hallway are you gonna focus on and have the best outcome after you've determined that now I'm gonna show you the math of how you can make sure that that hallway looks the best it possibly can so you're gonna need to make a reference line of where you want a seam of your boards and the way you do that mathematically and this will work for a hallway or a room we're gonna focus on the hallway because that's where we're gonna have this reference line you're gonna measure the distance of the hallway so for hypothetical reasons let's just say that distance is 10 you take whatever number you get and you divide it by 2 what that tells you is the distance from the outer edge to the very middle of the hallway now that we know what the half of the hallway distance is you don't have to actually put the boards together but I find it easiest to visualize so if you start putting boards together and make the width bigger than the hallway or at least half the hallway you can now either measure from the edge over or you can pick a seam in the boards you've put together and measure over from the right or left half the distance of the hallway at the end of that measurement is gonna show you what the last board is gonna be like and it's gonna be symmetrical to where both the right and the left side of the hallway are gonna have that width of a board as you can see here in this visualization and when you do this you're gonna have one of two possible outcomes one is that last board on the edge is gonna be equal to or greater than half of a plank of one board or it's gonna be less than half a plank now in this case it's more than half a plank so we're gonna keep it as is but in this next scenario you'll see when the boards on the edge of the hallway are less than one half or even just a little tiny sliver it really doesn't look that good and we want to avoid that now when you measure it and you see that that's happening there's actually a pretty easy fix to this instead of putting the middle of the hallway on a seam we're gonna put it in the middle of a board and that will make the outer edges look a lot better and be more than half a and all you need to do this is measure half the board over and move your seam over there it can be in either direction and this seam is gonna be our reference line and what we base everything off of for us that works out to where if the seam is right on that line that will be the biggest and best looking for this hallway we're on each side is a nice big fat piece of board and it's symmetrical and it's gonna look best so once you figure that out then you know okay here's where the seam is going to be and then you want to measure from one of the walls where that seam is and try to get a straight of a line as possible so we were measuring from this wall figure what the exact measurement was it was like 21 inches and a quarter or something so we just measured 21 inches and a quarter off of this wall all the way to the other end and we do a little Sharpie marks on it then we took our chalk line and we went relatively over those Sharpie marks and laid it down and then I took a step back and looked at it and made sure that it looks straight now if it doesn't look straight it's probably because your wall isn't straight and you want your eye to think that it's straight so adjust your chalk line before you snap it to look straight to your eye and to where you like it you just want to create that nice straight line down your floor so you have a reference point of how all your pieces are gonna line up that's where I'm going to base everything off of and it's all based off of this line alright so now that we have this line there was a couple reasons I didn't want to start all the way over on the wall and work my way down like most the videos will say one reason was because that back wall was not a good starting point it wasn't straight and it wasn't sturdy so if we tried to hammer our pieces together and make them tight that back drywall was gonna crumble and move a little bit and not be secure the other reason is I want to create a little door for that stump so we actually started Midway of the floor and you want to something to back it up on to because you can see as Julian's like applying these he's gonna be hammering the vinyl so that it's flush those seams come together real nice so as you hammer that it's gonna push everything back and if you don't have an anchor like what we did here then I'll just keep pushing it back so I'm on concrete so we just drilled these uh I think they're called tie can screws right into the concrete and just made little scrap pieces to anchor this down so we have a nice backing and we wanted to make sure that these seams are aligned with this line so what I did was figure it out how many boards would fit in between so we have an exact seam right on here it came to eight boards which was 67 and a half inches for us and the reason I chose that is just I needed it far enough back to where I leave the space open so you could have started way closer to the wallets so then with these four anchors we measured 67 and a half and then we anchored it down right there and screwed it into the floor so it couldn't move but you get it straight relative to this line so we know that the edge of each board as we come down here is parallel from this line right here and now we have a base and we can just start installing and work our way all the way to the other wall going through the hallway going through the other room and I'll all connect and work out these rooms might not be perfect to where you might have a sliver on the side but the hallway won't and that's where most people are going to see and what is most important to me the issue I ran into is you know coming through the hallway here had a spacer there you can see like how the drywall just moves and then it's like sturdy here so this isn't a sturdy backing even on this side so as I go to tighten up this hallway and hammer in my my stuff what's gonna happen is it's gonna push back and start to go into that hallway and nothing's gonna tighten up so I had to put another anchor block in my hallway to make sure that hey this stays in place so as I am finishing out this hallway and tightening up by pushing this way push this way in this way most of the time these aren't going to move and everything isn't going to come out of place and that I'll actually stay on this line because as you work your way down I start putting pressure here you know it's got backing over there but not here and then what will happen is this line will start to start to be off on an angle and not work out the way that I wanted it to last things I'm going to cover right now I'm gonna tell you exactly how you actually install the floor then I'll cover you know the biggest mistakes that people make as well as some pro tips to make the floor install go smooth and efficiently so you can see I'm actually putting in the floor here and it's actually not that difficult as I mentioned you need to start in one corner and go to the end because of the way the locking mechanism works so after you know the layout of your room and you put down the anchor points to start your first row or perhaps you even just use the back wall to support your first row you're gonna put down a full first row and when you get to the end you're going to need to cut that last piece down to the right size and it's not always going to be a clean just cut off straight with a razor blade sometimes you're gonna have something intricate like what I'm showing you right here so I'm gonna run you through how you actually would make this cut so that the pieces all come together and work see is too long so the first thing is make sure you got your spacer up now you know hey if I put this up against the wall I'm leaving space for my expansion and it's also not too much space for the baseboard or molding isn't gonna cover now this is the way the board's supposed to go but if I were to just make this cut right here because I would be the length it cut it like that what's gonna happen is you're gonna get rid of this lip that connects here so if you actually flip the board over now when you cut off this end that's theme that's gonna be against the wall which is fine to cut off that in so make sure you flip the board over sure especially if it's the first time you're gonna steak often but now you know hey this is where I need to cut the board so that it's the perfect length with the perfect amount of space over there you also need to realize are you cutting where the edge of the tongue is right there on this guy right here or you can use this language the actual edge of the wood is because that into the wood he's actually go over this tongue Baxter got there so don't cut right here when the edge of like though I've been tongue groove is we need to cut where the actual edge of the board is so what about close against there put your square right on that edge so you know hey this is a nice clean perfect line use an extra throw away that I put under there so when I come off this I got you the good wood or whatever now I like to just use my foot and I put pressure with my hand get it lined up perfect so that way nothing moves and then I just have a little bit of force going this way so my blade stays tight up against my square I do it twice to get a nice score to make it break easier if you don't break the laminate this way you want to break it away so that I just like to use a kind here something in it just comes right apart really easy you might have a little bit of a weird gouge but that is gonna be up against the wall with the spacer and covered by the baseboard if you break it this way in I just find that it doesn't make a clean cut there and you run into some issues so now I know I hate my board is the right length to where I have space and it lines up with the tongue-and-groove got the right amount of space here now we've got the issue of how where am I gonna make this not as obviously on this board I need to come down for the length of this wall and then I need to rush over to that wall so to draw mine those notches you can use a piece of scrap wood right and you're gonna put it up against your spacer here so you know hey it's the right amount of length for my not to wear it has been in to expand and the baseboards gonna cover it so make sure you're always using your spacer and make sure you know if one of your boards was cut some straight line that this scrap board has the straight line out of the manufacturing it's always trying to use your straight line I'm doing this now we're going to mark where we're going to start making this cut which is right there and I just find it easier with a block and you could use the square you just want to make sure that you know you are square so now we know that's where we're going to start the cut because we put the board up push up against the spacer all right so now here should put that board in the tongue-and-groove right so like this is how this board when we get it cut it's actually going to fit in there we know that's where it's gonna be so now we can figure out where do we need to cut it here we're gonna put them on this board and transfer it to this work so if we have our spacer there or making sure you know hey we're good right there is where it's gonna be so I'm gonna mark that alright so now I'm gonna put this board on top of this board here make sure it's exactly lined up and all right so I'm gonna use my square make sure we get a nice straight line this basement was finished by the homeowner and it was not a very good job so I'm really counting on this wall probably not being straight you know the exterior walls are relatively straight the interior walls are comically crooked all right so now just where is this wall straight and I'll show you an easy way to know we're going to take this board [Music] at least straight to the wheedled my wives are going so now that this is in there nice and tight good I know that straight so then you're gonna take your tape measure for the measure right here I'm getting about four inches measure in the middle I'm getting about four and an eighth measure in the back and I'm getting four in the quarter so I know that paint this wall actually tapers back towards the back and you know almost towards the full back into a quarter of an inch so if I cut this straight down my spacers a quarter of an inch by the end it's going to be packaged which is the size of my baseboard so I'm risking not having the baseboard cover this so all that you need to do is measure right here give them three and seven eighths so I need to subtract quarter-inch to eighths as a quarter of an inch so I'm going to go to five days so I'm gonna go three and five-eighths back here and I'm gonna make my dog there it's not all I'm gonna do is draw a straight line connecting those two dots and I accounted for the wall not being straight and I'll have a nice consistent Panchen gap where it's got room to expand and contract and the baseboards gonna cover no problem now you can see I put down the board and then I first seal the end seam with a rubber mallet then I put my tapping block on the edge now notice how I stand with my left foot on the other board and then tap it into place the reason I'm standing now with my right foot and tapping it in is because it's gonna want to push those boards back so I'm using the weight on my body to keep that board steady since all that's really holding it in place is a little spacer and some weak drywall so make sure you stand on the row in front of the one you're installing to make sure when you're hammering the board's to lock them together it's not making it push back or get cockeyed or twist or turn in the end they stay pretty steady because in this room you can notice I didn't have those anchors but see now when I was hammering there I'm always standing on the board's behind it just to make sure that it has a little bit of backing now when you go to put down a new board if you actually lift it up at a slight like 10 to 20 degree angle and slide it in see how it's up on an angle now I start tapping it in and watch it will actually drop down that's how you know it's locking into place and when you tap it in that seam at least for this product literally like disappears and if the prints really similar you can sometimes not even see where the seam is which is pretty awesome now I tried to end the joints up tight together but sometimes they aren't perfect so if you take your pull bar and then you actually put your weight on it and stand with your foot it seems to work better just give it a couple taps with the hammer and then go check the seam and it should be flush and disappeared just like the edges the end should look the same if not give it a couple more taps with your rubber mallet and you'll see at least for me it completely disappeared to where you can barely even see it and it's nice and tight and you know your flooring is good now you can move on to installing the next piece you can see when I go to install the next piece I really try to lined up the end so that it is flush so that I don't have to use that pole bar and I would say 90% of the time you don't have to but sometimes when you're locking it in and you tap it together it tends to pull out just a little bit and you can see a little tiny you know 30 seconds of a gap in between those seams so give it a couple more taps make sure everything's nice and tight and you'll be good to go now when I open up this new box I'm looking through the boards and looking at the pattern or the print that's on there you know there was probably like six different on this particular product but they were in different areas and sometimes reversed or flipped around so you just want to make sure that you don't install two boards that are identical right next to each other you know whether that's the right left top or bottom so you want to look for that when you're putting down your board you'll even notice sometimes I put down a board and then I move it and put a different board down and I'm doing it because I'm trying to avoid that pattern repeat the other thing you want to consider is you don't want your seems to be staggered in a perfect pattern you want them to be kind of random you also want to make sure that you have at least four this product I believe it was six inch distance between the seams and that's just for the structural integrity to make sure that it's strong and that the seams aren't going to come undone with kicking and scuffing the floor with your shoes now you can see when you just have a square room it's actually pretty easy you're just repeating the same thing over and over again and you don't have any intricate cuts to make so you can do it all with a razor blade and it goes pretty smooth and efficiently unless you do this for a living everyday in my opinion if you try to rush the job you're actually going to create more time and more material waste the reason I learned this is I actually paid a buddy to help me install this floor and because he's a really nice guy he wanted to go as quick as he could to get me a good value but what we found was a lot of mistakes get made when you try to go quickly which leads me into my next topic which is the biggest and most common mistakes beginners are gonna make what you don't want is this to where you're gonna be able to see the floor isn't underneath the baseboard and there's gonna be gaps there and also when you're trying to get these seams tight and you're hammering it down you know so if you go to this other end and you start using the pull bar to hammer it this way it's gonna move all the way into the wall unless you have the spacer there and then it's gonna be too close to the wall there so those spacers are perfect gives you plenty of room to cover it with your baseboard as well as gives you a backing so you can use it to hammer into it make all the seams tight another thing you want to be careful of you is just trying to go too fast and be rough we're using this blocking within five minutes it was broken so take your time be careful and then you know if you're trying to go too quick and stuff like you can see the floor is broken here we're on the edge it's all chipped up and if that does happen just replace the board don't keep going because now it creates more work to have to go back through and replace it you know you need to make sure between the end of your board and where your other type of flooring starts that that transition piece is gonna cover and make sure that it fits you know so that you don't have gaps so my buddy decided to skip this little knock out in the room and the reason he did that is because it was gonna be difficult and he wanted to get a lot of work done and go fast now you don't want to skip things because if you do it wrong you have to go back and fix it and in this case he did do it wrong what he did was he cut the board straight down and on the bottom cut off this locking mechanism here so that you can't keep going you can't connect another board to the end of that piece so instead of cutting it straight down what he should have done was made these l-shaped notches and cut it with a jigsaw that's why he skipped it because you knew it was gonna be tough but now that we can't finish it out you actually have to tear up all the floor and go all the way back to that spot to finish which you can see I did here so it actually created a ton more time by trying to go too quick so when you're going around corners make sure you don't do this mistake and I would just recommend finishing everything so everything behind you is just done and you know it's correct and you can move on this is probably a rare situation but when you have a board where you're actually cutting out a slot in the middle or in this case on both sides of the middle you got to remember you can't actually slide this board underneath so you can see I took a ton of time measuring here making sure my cuts were great and I'm like great I'm gonna use one board it's gonna look so good and then as soon as I got done I go to actually install it and I realize oh it's a wedge I can't slide it in from the side there's no way I can actually make this work I just wasted a ton of time now you might be thinking you can just cut the board in half and it'll work but then where you actually cut it in half it's just too but and joints connected and there's no locking mechanism there so that actually won't work so the solution was I had to take a board that I finished a row with so that the end piece has the locking mechanism and the beginning piece can start a new row I transferred the cuts I made onto the beginning part and then slid that under the door now I need to take a full board so that both on the right and left side there's the locking mechanism and I need to figure out where to transfer my cuts from the previous board that I just cut in half and had to trash onto that full board so that way it'll slide up underneath the hallway and then the left side will connect to the end of the board that I've already installed as you can see here but then on the far right side of that board it the end of the hallway is gonna be a little sliver and it's gonna have that locking mechanism on there now I'm gonna have to rip rule of skinny boards so that I can finish out that row and then start a completely new row here's that little skinny sliver piece on the other side that I need to finish that out and go all the way to the wall so I can start a new row sometimes when you're connecting the boards you try to get the seams to be flush and you'll notice there's a little gap and for some reason even when you're tapping it in it doesn't want to go in this is most common because there's some dirt or grit that has gotten into that groove and a big thing that causes this is if you're cutting the board with the saw it creates plastic little particles that go everywhere and sometimes those fall into the groove preventing you from being able to lock it in place so the pro tip here is make your saw cuts when you're not cutting with a razor blade in a different area like I was doing it in the garage and even after I was done cutting it I took a little towel and I wiped the board off because a lot of those plastic particles because I think a static electricity want to stick to the board so wipe off your cut edge really clean and get all those particles off so it's less likely to happen if it does happen all you have to do is clean out that little groove I happen to have a shopback right there so I was just vacuuming out the seams but later I learned that it was actually a lot easier and quicker to just carry a paintbrush with at all times and when I try to connect the board if it wouldn't go in I just pull it out wipe that seam clean with my brush as you can see here and then it would install really easy I just found out to be a lot quicker and more efficient just carry one of those on you and you're good another pro tip is sometimes when you cut off the end of a boar to finish a row you're not going to use that exact board to start the next row because it's going to repeat a pattern or the seams will be too close so you're gonna put that board in a pile and I have two piles a pile where the right side of the board has the locking mechanism and another pile where the left side of the board has locking mechanism and you can pick from those two piles and decide hey these are all my starting row piles and these are all my ending row piles which is just gonna cut down on waste and make the job a little easier for you when you get to the end of a room a lot of times you have to rip a really thin board to finish it out now when this happens the board has a tendency to want to pop out of the seam like this especially on my floor because I had an extreme case where for some reason my slab ended and then the concrete slab from outside started and they weren't level as shown here so I actually tried to fill that with foam which was a big mistake and then cut that foam down so that it was flat but that foam isn't strong so when I step on that I've seen it wants to pop it out and it just didn't want to stay in place the other area that this actually happened was when you're working backwards like where I made those anchor points sometimes when you try to put in that last piece has a tendency to want to break the locking mechanism and then doesn't stay in as good it wasn't extreme as the other side but surprisingly super glue works really really well so you can see this back row I'm putting in right now it didn't want to stay down but as soon as I put superglue on the edges it was surprisingly secure and I haven't had an issue since so there's another pro tip for you so that's how you install the floor you'd actually be surprised this stuff is really durable as you can see here I have super heavy stuff on it like an aquarium that weighs thousands of pounds and it hasn't really even dented it so I'm really impressed with it and it's really versatile you know I made some pretty intricate cuts on stuff like this to where it worked out great and I haven't had an issue with it and you know you can pretty much do anything if you put your mind to it you're gonna have to do a lot of measuring and use paper to make templates like that's how I made the circle and stuff but it all stays together really good and I'm really impressed with it and would definitely recommend it have hard work in my kitchen and this is much more durable than that my dog scratches it up you drop a can on it puts a dent in it you know you leave water there it starts to warp like I don't think I'd ever use hardwood again unless it just deteriorates quickly but I've had it for about six months now and I'm super happy with it

Channel: Walt's Reviews

Views: 129,387

Rating: 4.922605 out of 5

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Id: A5ob3fLkzLc

Length: 50min 59sec (3059 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020