How to Lay an Engineered Oak Floor on Joists

hi welcome to a new project in today's video I'm gonna be showing you how I blade tongue and groove flooring in this case engineered oak in my bedroom and I get a bit out loading all the processes that I've been through from the choice of the boards themselves through to the clamping of the board's down and finally the process of gluing and fixing them into place [Applause] so this is the second floor in the house that we've ripped up and relayed the first from identical engineered egg was laid three years ago and stayed a bespoke color to match the Victorian floorboards downstairs and as that floor looks so good today as it did three years ago we thought we stick with the winning formula but with a couple of improvements I'll be outlining in today's video and front of you wondering why we're replacing the old floor the lovely Victorian eighth floor was ripped up in the 1970s and these nasty cheap tongue-and-groove floorboards were put down as place the floor is too creepy on the foot as part of the major refurb of this room it seems an absolute no-brainer to replace that with this in today's tool kit we've got two hundred and twenty by twenty one millimeter thick engineered oak flooring this came from jfj wood flooring from that supreme oak flooring range we then got three point five by forty five millimeter tall tight tongue-and-groove screws next we've got laminate tie-down straps which have a five meter strap you'll all just need a hammer and then I've got some handmade tappers which I use to close up the gap once the floor board is clamped in place every DIY needs a gorilla bar this has been so useful both in terms of ripping up the old floorboards and helping to put down the new ones you'll need a universal saw something like this to trim down the final floor board on each run while it's not essential gluing the floor boards down to the joists below is a good idea and for this job I was trying a brand new product this battery-powered glue gun but I'll also be running through the other more everyday glues that you can use because my joists are so old and so uneven I used a number of glazing Packers these are 28 millimeters wide and each color corresponds with a different thickness and finally it uses impact driver to drive on the tarmac screws it makes driving them in a lot easier using an impact driver as usual details of all the tools I've used in today's video will be in the description at the end of the video so coaching people ask can you put up hungry floorboards without damaging them well with a tool it's gotta say it's really difficult and did put the troubles back down in my son's room but I wish I haven't bothered and this be honest with you if you could do it without destroying hungry in case you're wondering I removed as many analysis like cooter with my gorilla bar but those I could not remove from the oak I have to grind off with my little driver choosing the right boards is obviously crucial particularly where like in my situation they're spanning floor joists so you've got to do your research to find the right boards for your project there's lots of information on the web and jfj why but my balls from have quite a useful resource section you might want to have a look at but I'm gonna run through now a few of the key points for you to consider should you go for engineered or silac ice of things solid oak was the thing you should aspire to the pinnacle of quality until I saw my parents floor and look at that conservatory three weeks after it been laid and there was a massive boat in the middle that's the mattress engineered wood flooring is so much more stable which you really need in harsh environments like bathrooms or kitchens where there are fluctuating levels of humidity look at my bathroom floor hasn't moved at all in the three years has been installed and whilst you told to PVA and joints I didn't even do that and look they haven't moved one millimeter so I would never ever lay a solid wood floor now on the back of my experience so let's have a quick chat about ball thickness my boards are 21 millimeters thick which is great we're like hey you're spanning floor joists also the six millimeter wear layer effectively gives you the durability you'd get from a normal solid 18 millimeter piece of oak and you can send it or otherwise treat it in exactly the same way as you would a solid wood floor you know the great thing about this floor boarding is with the tongue and grooving around the end as well as the length of the plank you can join the boards in between choices rather than having to have a choice under where each plank joins as you would have traditionally have done and this is great as it cuts down on wastage but I would only advise doing this if your floor boards are like mine 21 millimeters thick or similar and finally with good quality boards you're likely to get a better quality cross slamming apply under core beneath the whaler and this is crucial for the strength of the board we're likely a spanning floor joist my boards are a fish milimeter on the core and I think the quality of that cross laminate speaks for itself but a 58 pounds per square meter including VAT they're not cheap but you'll find most boards of this quality on the market will be similarly priced and you'll just have to shop around to find the right specification and boards for your budget and finally let's talk about board length and width boards come in lots of widths and lengths and some cheaper packs have random lengths of board now a lot of people say the length of width of the board you use depends on the size of the room I don't hold too much stock on this because my bathroom which is very small as 2.2 meters by 220 millimeter floor boards the same as these ones I've got in here and I love it but you've got to choose what's right for your project remember though that shorter narrower boards are going to tell you a lot longer to fit your the point to consider is where typically you've got 400 millimeter centers between joists you want to have your floor board spanning at least two joists so that you don't have a sort of seesaw effect on shorter boards that only span one joist what's the personal taste in my opinion you do want to stagger your floor boards I think if you lay them symmetrically like bricks that looks pretty awful and if you buy packs like this you might find that at least one board in each pad is bitten too which is really helpful for staggering the floor boards now my oak floor joists being over a hundred years old were completely uneven as you can see here I hope you won't have this problem but it did give me a few weeks of head-scratching not least because my joists were twisted sideways as well as horizontally which meant I couldn't screw battens to the side of the joist to level the entire floor for laying the boards so I'd serve in the end to use a combination of wooden and plastic Packers you can get glazing Packers like this or more substantial shims all of which come in a variety of thicknesses which is a lot less time-consuming than individually cutting strips of work to go into your floor boards details of all these tools will be in the description at the end of the video so to keep the job off on the right footing I enlist the help of my friend John who is a professional carpenter and his impact was crucial on a couple of fronts first see here the idea of setting the first floor joists exactly parallel to the wall by measuring 400 millimetres away from the wall at two points across the wall and pinging a chalk line on this point the wood itself wasn't straight along its length so referencing the first floor board of klein not the wall ensured that the floorboard was straight along its length and parallel to the wall which is massive important if you want to make sure there are no gaps between your floorboards when you start clamping them together and screwing them down yeah the crucial bit of advice John gave me was the best technique for tightly clamping the floorboards together now my bathroom floor I used this traditional fashion technique of wedge clamping which was a really effective but time-consuming way to clamp the floorboards together I was quite tempted by these but they're expensive and some of my joists are over 140 millimeters wide so they wouldn't fit on those joists and that's where John was brilliant again because he recommended these laminates tie-down straps that he uses all the time in his day job absolute snip at four pounds twenty two each so how do these straps actually work well the idea is that five metre straps are long enough to span most rooms you meant to hook the strap plate over the first floor board but as I didn't know I was using these when I batten the wall and I have enough gap to spray my expanding foam underneath but not enough for these to pass all the way to the back so what John did is designed these clever strap base plates with two screws into the floor in a position where you won't see them because they'll be covered by the skirting board and then the strap plate simply sits on that board and you can clamp it into position he even thought to add a little extra extension piece because if you haven't done that the tendency is for the strap plate to pivot off as you can't hit tight and we positioned five of these across the floor including this one clearly designed to fit around the radiator and then the other one is simply a question of hooking the plate only a floorboard taking out the suck in the strap and then clamping the strap sight to release the strap you then put on these clips like say now that's what Welling good you'll find it useful to construct out the offcuts of the floorboards a couple of these what I call top a blocks I use these to roughly tap the floorboard into place start I also crucially use them as you can see here to close off the end-to-end gap of the floorboards but finally you'll find them enormous ly effective with the clamps because sometimes a clamp doesn't close a gap but a quick tap with the tapper and the gap is completely gone and with the strap tensioning the floorboard you can then screw the floorboard firmly into place that's nice the final segment of this video how should we fix down a floor there are no guns you can use like Porter nails but you've got to buy or hire one of these so by far the best solution in Mike's foods is tongue-tied screws so these are the three and a half by four five millimeter I use these in the bathroom and I'm using them here Pacifica be screwed in without spoil remember I was screwing into okay between the tongue and the board so that when the next floorboard is slotted into place the screw is completely invisible I bought two boxes all 400 screws for this 17.6 square meter room and I've used about 3/4 of them inserting one screw into each joist which in conjunction with the glue I consider to be ample each box comes with a t10 Torx bit now these Torx bits are very small and Domino both talking about the fact on previous projects had issues with these damaging when they come out to the screw so much so that I've got myself a load of spares just case but the manufactures that once he got this right now because I'm still on the first t-turn bit that I got with the first box of screws as you can see and that's even with a bit of coming when I was using my cross set screwdriver bit for tricky to reach spaces so very impressed with the quality of these talks bits but a combination of these tiny screw heads and the very small TX bit it's surf means you do have to be a bit careful as you can see here where I had a bit of disaster driving in one of these screws like it for me and I'm going to be staining this floor and actually to fill pretty well so through to the last point should you or should you not glue your floorboards down well obviously the main benefit of not blowing them down when combined with these tongue tight squeeze which are movable is it does make it easier for you to remove the floor should you need to do so any point but none of us already putting these floors down with the intention of taking them up in a couple years I hope not anyway our bathroom floor does creak a little bit and was not glued down so I was keen in this room where the joists are actually quite springy to glue the floorboards down to the joists to give the floor as much so that it is possible so what are the girl kids well I could have used a good old traditional wood adhesive like this only problem with this is it doesn't have any gap-filling properties and with my joists so uneven I really need to something a little bit more forgiving although I did end up using this on the short end joints I could have used this general-purpose gap-fill adhesive I've used a lot of grateful in the past and as you can see here John and I had a bit of an experiment using the pink version of this adhesive on one area the floor where we had some pretty wide gaps to fill perhaps the most obvious choice was this joint and joist adhesive from Egger as you can see from the visual here this has great gap filling properties and frames up without any water or other curing agent this is undeniably impressive stuff just look how those two beads of the join adhesive have completely expanded and totally welded that piece of floor board to the joist [Music] absolutely rock-solid cannot remove that but in the end the choice has made for me because I was recently contacted by power deesis to ask if I would be happy to try out one of their new battery-powered hot melt glue guns I was intrigued by this having never used a glue gun previously and particularly the fact that it works on your battery and don't worry if you're not reliably use it because they have an adapter that works on for the biggest brands Bosch Milwaukee Dewalt and Makita what I loved about this glue was 180 second thought about glutinous still allows for expansion and movement of the flooring you have to work reasonably quickly you've basically got 180 seconds to position the flooring before the glue sets just quick heads up this haven't quite hit the shelves yet but look out for a video from me in January 2020 as soon as it does when are they carrying out a more in-depth review of this good gun so as I said earlier the beauty of this flooring system and not having two ND floor board on the joists is you only have to make one cut per run of floorboards across the room and you can see here how we finish the floorboards off along this side of the room Wow to stagger the boards we've got from combination off shortcuts got a lovely piece here and once we've got the clams and the toppers to close the end joints up tight you do have to improvise a bit and that's where my gorilla bar has proved really useful as you can see how I'm this tricky little cut around the chimney breasts I was able to wedge the gorilla bar between the wall and the floor board to push the floor board up tight to place gap between that and the next board and this final cut down section where you're finishing the floorboards off is always a bit tricky and requires a bit of improvisation now to cut the final T floor boards down through required width I use my circular saw I pride myself on not using sophisticated tools generally for my DIY but if you haven't already got a circular saw I can't recommend enough you buying one because it has been an absolute game changer for me in cutting long lengths of timber link to it is coming up on the screen now I'll also included scription at the end of this video links to the videos where I made my foiling workbench I then had to check the remaining joists and glue Packers down where necessary and then slide the two final pieces of floor boarding into position clamping and screwing them into place as per usual so doorways could also be pretty tricky why don't forget we've only got over six millimeters down the floor board so you don't want this cross laminate apply showing and this is perhaps been the most satisfying part of the project for me because I found this old piece of oak that the previous owners had stored up in the roof space of the garage into providing a seamless link between the floorboards and the doorway most of the other floorboards ripped on the 70s have obviously not survived but it's just nice to have a reminder as I walk through the room each day of the old oak floor that used to be there one final point I will now be treating staining this floor as we did with our bathroom with two-thirds antique oak one third at ever need to create that Victorian look I love this color design product it produces a really authentic finish and when combined with a couple of coats off a hard wax oil it's incredibly durable we haven't had to do anything with that bathroom thought and it takes a lot of stick link to the video posts a few years ago show you how to use it product is coming up on the screen now that's it how you found today's video useful you've got any comments or questions please leave them in the comment section below and as usual I'll include in the description details of everything that I've used in today's video if you liked today's video please click on the like button below and as I always say if you're new to my channel I would so love the time you subscribe it's a massive source of support for me as my subscriber levels grow whilst I'm spending a lot of time filming and editing these videos you can do that by clicking on the link here

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 84,102

Keywords: how to lay engineered oak floorboards on floor joists, charlie diyte, engineered oak, tongue and groove, DIY, bedroom refurbishment

Id: KHrArgtOm6w

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 23 2019