How To Level Your Floors

hi it's Jeff with home renovation DIY and today we are going to be covering the really intricate world of prepping your floor it doesn't sound very sexy I know but don't install any of your luxury vinyl plank or laminate flooring until you've seen this video and you know how to prep things up that'll ensure that you get the performance you're looking for without all those crazy sounds well let's get into this laminate and vinyl flooring have one thing in common they're what's called a floating floor so you're not attaching that flooring to anything so when that kind of situation comes around you've got to prep your floor different than if you're attaching it like doing a tile where you're cementing it in place or using hardwood where you're nailing it all in place the preparation for floating floors is crucial because a it has to be super clean but secondly your substrate has to be incredibly strong because all of the strength of the floor is in the substrate not in any of the material going on top most people today the reason the putting in a floating floor is the ripping out carpet or the ripping out of laminate and they're putting it on a new floating floor a lot of folks are upgrading to vinyl and if your house is like mine it's not exactly low so we're gonna show you today how to put floor level or in how to screw down your subfloor so whether you have a wood floor or you're on cement there's gonna be great tips and tricks in this video tip number one it's screwed on your floor if your iOS be most homes unless you're a relatively new build and you'll know as soon as you look at it you'll see the nails in the floor if you have nails you've got to throw a screw next to every nail to tighten your floor down okay every one of these joins well we'll have deflection and what I mean by that is there's a floor joist here there'll be a floor joist 16 inches over and every time you step in between them your weight is gonna cause that wood to lift where the nails are and when the wood lifts it's going to cause the wood to go up and down over the shaft of the nail and it's going to cause squeaking so to avoid problems of squeaking floors always screw them down first if you're lucky enough to be in a new build you'll notice that you have screws and not nails that means they've screwed and glued the subfloor so you don't have to worry about that step of the preparation if you're on concrete or you have a slab on grade home then you obviously don't have to worry about that the next step for preparing or your floor of course this floor level or if you need it now if you're on the slab and a lot of cases you're going to have uneven concrete pour well these guys come in they make a frame they pour the concrete but then when they're finishing they're bringing an equipment that causes it to be pushed around and you get a bit of a bowl effect it's the same if you're in a basement the concrete actually has lower spots and higher spots in the room and so in most cases floating floors can adapt through those subtle changes and it's not necessary to use a floor leveler but in my case it's an older home and the middle of the house actually collapsed a little bit so we're raising it all back up and the way we did it is we actually took layers of plywood and screwed it down to build up until it was almost level and then we primed it and add the floor leveler we also installed some two by twos around the perimeter of the room to contain the area that we're leveling and this gives us a lot more control on this type of floor its tongue and groove and the particular manufacturer every 16 inches there's actually a hole the tongue is missing so when you put the floor together you end up with these problems where the leveler will actually go down that hole okay and so what you want to do here is just stuff in some paper all right and then cut it flush right there okay now you're set up you can use the primer and you can pour it floor leveler and you're not going to have cement working its way underneath the floor and there we go in some cases that is all it takes all the cement for the poor will end up going through that hole because it's self leveling and it'll end up in the ceiling cavity or maybe in the basement on your furniture downstairs lesson learned that one the hard way all right before you pour your floor leveler and install your flooring especially if you've had a carpet you're gonna want to do an inspection on the surface for things like carpet staples right you can do that with a hammer put your hammer on the side and you can just run it back and forth and you're gonna hear that you're gonna feel the ridge you can take your pair of trusty pliers grab your staples get them out of the way make sure your floor is solid and sound and you don't have any fastener sticking up out of it when all of that is said and done you're ready to go now I can't emphasize enough how important it is to do a good sweep of the room and if you haven't a vacuum attachment that you can actually vacuum every square inch it's worth investing than time to do that now with floor leveler it's not necessary to actually get on your hands and knees and wash it I know when we're doing tile work we always want to wash our plywood but for floor level or you don't need to do that and the difference being is this right here this primer is going to take care of making sure that this floor is ready to take on the cement it's a special compounds they bond well together if the primer goes right into the content contours of the wood so I'm using a product I just went down at a local Home Depot and picked up because generally speaking the floor level is four level there's not a whole lot of options out there if you're using leveler for the hardwood flooring purposes and you need to have your staples go into that level or as well then definitely go to a supplier for floor products they all have different products designed specifically to receive staples as well this stuff you just pour it out okay and use a little roller now all you have to do is get the area that you want to pour your level or damp okay and you can manipulate this stuff just fine you don't have to put in a whole lot of it to get it to do this job you just need the surface damp and we're basically just going to paint the flooring in and around the area where we're expecting it to flow okay now what this does this primer does two things make sure that there's the floor has got a good bond to this concrete but more importantly it will keep your leveler from cracking so that when you're walking around you aren't going to get crunchy bits underneath your feet no my dip and my floor is right around here the center of it is over towards the stairs so I'm expecting to get a fair amount of leveler here which is good because I'm doing a nine foot island and I'm getting appliances put here so it'd be nice if this floor was all level it'll make the installation of those appliances a lot easier so I'm really making sure that I'm covering the area that I'm expecting it to go now leveler itself can only be applied and I would say quarter to half inch maximum in one pour so if you're gonna go more than that you can always put down would first generally speaking like what we're gonna do is we're gonna pour it here but I know it's gonna overlap existing primer I'm sorry existing leveler does not need to be primed in between coats it bonds to itself just fine the priming is just for new wood or new concrete areas so don't get too concerned about that one little jug of this primer is enough primer for probably five or six bags a level or just so you know you don't end up wasting your money buying a whole lot of product you don't need now you want to make sure that this stuff is dry before you add your floor leveler that takes about half an hour to an hour and 20 minutes if you use a fan okay you're allowed to speed up the process it's just a water-based product and so if you add a fan to it that'll get you in business in no time there we go I'm pretty happy with that okay next up alright so the instructions for mixing your floor level or here follow but if you feel like it I've been mixing this stuff for so many years I know what it looks like when it's done so we're gonna do a half bag at a time which is about two and a half liters of water which is about point 5 at the point six gallons all right there we go I need more water I can tell already now the pails from Home Depot are not big enough to mix a whole bag but if you go to a flurry supply place they give you just a little bit bigger of a pail and you'll be able to get all that in one shot now I like using a slow mixer for this kind of product it takes a lot of torque nice and easy until those products are mixed together it's a sloppy mess primarily you're mixing sand in the water here all right so let's see what it looks like yeah that's that's pretty alright it is self leveling so it's gonna be somewhat fluid alright okay now what I do is I generally like to pour it out layers like this okay we'll leave the pail there for a minute let it all run out floor leveler you'll see there's a ridge here although it flows it's not perfect so you can actually use a trowel smooth it out you can help to manipulate it a little bit when it's done you can also send it so if you need it to be really smooth you can accomplish that task no problem mix the rest of that bag [Music] okay oh yeah this last batch I made a little thinner on purpose then we're gonna just tie all the old together with the new this batch I made a little thinner oh did we yeah I probably wouldn't have killed if I stood on the 32nd degree but you can just mix it up right here on the floor so that's the advantage of the last bag you've roll make it nice and thin and then it'll self level right into perfection and here we go it's me now we're gonna have a surface that's incredibly level for the rest of the island we've built out on so that nothing is gonna look funky and when I go to do all my finished carpentry and install pretend Gables and everything around the island I'm gonna be dealing with a flat level surface instead of scribing up and down all over the place last thing you need to know depending on how sensitive the installation is that you're doing you can actually sand this finish okay um so you can take the bridges off around the edges and make it absolutely perfect this sandpaper here is actually 150 I would recommend going with an 80 grit to do this application but for the purpose of the video today I just want to demonstrate it can be sanded now that's pretty much a level floor which means I can finish all my carpentry island installation appliance installation no more issues huh cost a few bucks takes a little bit time but makes all the finishing installations so simple highly recommend leveling before you put in your flooring now if you want to learn about how to install flooring then click the video here we got to see put together for hardwood laminate and vinyl you're gonna love it we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 741,865

Rating: 4.8692055 out of 5

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, jeff, floor leveler, how to level your floor, how to level floors, level basement floors, level sloping floor, level floors, leveler

Id: cGHlkW2lJpY

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 04 2020