My Favorite subfloor/underlay for basements! DMX 1-Step

come back to another random repair video I'm just gonna show you this subfloor I've been using for installing laminate or carpet or you can hardwood vinyl in basement over concrete so what we have here is a nice level clean scraped concrete floor and then this product which is called DMX one step this is how you buy it it's 100 square feet per roll here in Canada it's what $80 a roll comes with paper tape attached and I find the tape usually a generous amount unless you go wild with it and yeah it's actually a great product now you can use it over flat level concrete just like this and then put your laminate 8 millimeter or thicker which this is 12 right on top of it so you can see this and a couple major benefits to this product actually just this particular product it's a plastic on the top super super strong and the bottom is a foam which helps absorb sound and adds an r-value and that's it's on your concrete and your laminate can go right on top now another option as well I put a Westby wood on top screwed it down and had a carpet installer stretch carpet over it and it makes for a beautiful subfloor when you want to carpet in the basement when you walk on it it feels like you know the main floor of a house it does not feel like a basement and your carpets fully protected which is nice then later in the future if you want to take the carpet up you can put pad and laminate or vinyl right over top of that OSB so in this case we have the laminate installing right over it this is a basement apartment and as you can see it's just been spray-painted and whatnot it needs the final walls painted it's kind of a kind of interesting space it's actually being turned from a like a two-bedroom apartment into a short-term Airbnb so hence the new floor and the renovation but the nice thing about this stuff is even with the laminate on it you walk on it I don't know how well you can hear that it also sounds and feels a lot like main floor of a house so you get the warmth you get the dry and all those benefits with a few others which I'm going to show you so when you install this you have to tape all the seams that way you get your vapor barrier and the bottom of your floor will always stay dry that's very important with laminate because any moisture can get into laminate and swallow it up and destroy it on you but for example here we have an old defunct clean-out there's a new one put in the wall on the other side here because I want it to be able to go over this now chances are it'll never need to be accessed but if it's under 8 millimeters which is what these these dimples are and this one's pretty much flush ice panned right over it now if I put a level on it the very top of this is even with the top of this and then I've taped it now this isn't like a recommended DMX process here but it can get you out of a bind if you do have some kind of a really small protrusion and the 12 millimeter laminate will easily spam without being damaged not a problem you know with any other underlay that would have been an issue so you know again I'm not suggesting you cover up cleanups and that or clean notes and that in your floor and whatnot unless you know they're never going to have to be accessed but that is a benefit to this product is its small defects in the floor can be covered now you still have to follow the manufacturer's instructions to the floor you're installing because this will follow the concrete perfectly so you know you see a little dip Larry little breeze there it here once the floor is on it though that goes down that's just from it being rolled up so one um one disadvantage obviously to putting the floor any flooring like this over concrete is it does have to be flat I'm going to show you this one room in here now this room the same stuff's going in here you can see all my laminate here this room here if you can see from here right to the edge it was like a very large bowl and in the center it was about an inch low so when we put a neat foot straight edge across it it was not going to work for the laminate flooring or DMX one steps so this area from here to the door and pretty much the width of the room either direction was poured with self-leveling floor patch and then feather feather edged out so that will be perfect now for receiving the DMX when Stephan and the rest of this place is more or less flat within what the manufacturer recommends this isn't water staining from leakage it's actually from what I brought these in it was snowy out and it's no 1 I'm going to melt it really really big benefit to this product though again is you're gonna save your floor and you're going to be more comfortable and you can install laminate right over it now I know there's other products available for a little bit less money that don't have this insulation here on the bottom but in my opinion that's the biggest advantage to this especially when you're not putting an OSB or something over the top I'll put a link to this product in the description anyway there is also one other product made by DMX it's the higher-end version of this called I believe it's called airflow I'll put a link as well in the description it's it claims now I haven't used that particular product yet but it claims you can put the carpet or the vinyl right on top of it with no need for OSB so if you're looking to do like a luxury vinyl plank floor that might be something you want to look into well thanks for watching hope this helps somebody with their project in my honest opinion and a review of this I don't know any guys at DMX they have not asked me to do this this is just a product I think deserves to be highlighted and this is just one of those things where you know you're going to spend a little bit more because here you know with with our tax in Ontario Canada and everything this ends up being about 90 cents extra square foot versus just putting down here well I guess over nothing it costs about 90 cents a square foot so in this particular apartment this is about five hundred and fifty dollars but it there's a very good chance with a small amount of seepage or moisture this'll save your floor and this laminate was sixteen seventeen hundred dollars so yeah it really only makes sense plus the level of comfort adds is a no-brainer thanks for watching guys subscribe if you want more building repair random tips have a good one

Channel: Random Repair

Views: 50,641

Rating: 4.8338656 out of 5

Keywords: laminate, hardwood, carpet, basement, slab, waterproofing, moisture barrier, vapor barrier, underlay, underpad, foam, insulation, leveling, dmx airflow, dmx onestep, dmx, plastic, dimple board, drain board, soundproofing, water, proofing, moisture, subfloor, delta, fl

Id: mAyB472UuNM

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2018