Starting a Vinyl Plank or Laminate Installation | Here's the BEST way

so i want to start by laying out my first row of planks down the wall now we are going to lay these out and before we make any cuts we're going to make sure it's straight so what i want to do is i want to start putting the butt joints together working my way down the wall and before i make my last final cut i want to measure to this chalk line and i'm going to tell you about that shortly now i have that groove facing the wall so it's going in the wrong way it would actually be flipped around to go in there this way but it's not i'm going backwards now i have it tight against the wall here there's a little bit of a lip on here but i want to make sure i leave it an expansion joint so i'm just going to mark my plank right to the edge of this groove right here right there that's how i'm going to get my cut it doesn't reach all the way i'm just going to cheat it i just score i'll go twice on it then i just take it break it right over my knee and now it's going in there the right way and you can see we have our cut okay so what we want to do here is we want to build a solid foundation and then we want to secure that so that we can build our plank off of it and have a real easy time with our installation so i lay out planks and then once we get those together we need to have a reference line to see where we're going to start you can see i measured the room as 136 inches and then i divide that in half and i came up with 68 inches now from that halfway mark of the room the 68 inches i've layout plank to the wall to see how large of a piece i'm going to have you can see it's going to be really small we don't like that we can change that by moving this over a half a plank and still have the same size piece on both sides of the room and it's about seven and a half inches well seven and a half inches divided by two is three and three quarter so now i want what i'm doing as you can see is my line right here is the 68 inches i moved this line over three and three quarters of an inch the half a plank now it's over on the half a plank now pan back over there and you can see i grew my piece so now that we've established where we're going to mark the floor now we want to snap a chalk line on those marks that we transferred on the floor on each end and now you want to figure out how many planks you are with the three planks that you put down on the floor how many planks you are away from your line i'm six planks away and i laid out those six planks to get the measurement that i needed which you seen and now i'm measuring away from this plank to the chalk line that certain amount of planks that i figured out and i'm going to do that all the way down now i'm cutting some scrap pieces here because we're going to use these to secure our floor so i'm going to cut them to fit in between the wall and the plank and then we're going to screw them down but we need to make sure we get the floor straight all the way down so i start at one end and i'm work and i'm working my way down making sure that i'm measuring it as i go and straightening the floor out and as far as these scraps go you're gonna put one on each seam and then you're going to put one on each end of the floor okay we're good down here too i think we're ready to just keep screwing the floor all right so now we have this secured you can see how we did all that now i just want you to know the reason why i do it like this is because this is better than those spacers that you put in the wall or i've seen people blue tape them they just don't work very well but you can see this floor ain't going anywhere it's going to be a nice solid foundation now it's perfectly straight our planks are going to go together great from here on out so now we'll just continue on installing this plank we have a great foundation to build off of it's going to make it a lot easier for you to install your floor the joints aren't going to come apart because the floor moves on us it's just going to take a lot of headaches away from you doing it this way now i want to talk to you a little bit about one more thing here that you can use during your installation this is called a cheater board now this i have a video that talks about this greatly how to make it it's really a great thing to use on your installation you can see how easy i was able to mark that wall for those cuts that are going to go in there with the plank no tape measure needed it's just really an invaluable an invaluable tool to be able to learn how to do this and i'll show you how to make that cheater board in this video the different ways that you can use it now you can see how i used it in this closet to get her to cut around these door jambs i built out that row a little bit i showed how to do these things in a lot of my different videos so be sure to go and check out my playlist on my youtube channel and you'll be able to get access to all these things and i go into a great detail on a lot of these things in different videos by the way my name is joe letender i just want to thank you for watching my video if i've helped you out at all could you hit that like button for me please and if you want to subscribe to my channel the subscribe button is right down below hit that bell if you want to be notified of any more videos i'm putting out a lot of videos right now so if you if you've liked what you've seen here i know that there's going to be a lot more for you to go and check out now i just want to pray for you and your family that you have blessings poured on you and i also pray that your projects go well problem free and i pray for this in jesus name and i just want to say god bless you all thanks for watching have a great day oh so that's how you do that

Channel: So That's How You Do That!

Views: 2,819,701

Keywords: vinyl plank flooring, how to install vinyl flooring, how to install vinyl plank flooring, installing vinyl flooring, installing vinyl plank flooring, how to install laminate, vinyl plank flooring install, vinyl plank flooring installation, vinyl flooring installation, diy vinyl plank flooring, vinyl plank, vinyl plank installation, luxury vinyl plank flooring, installing laminate flooring, laminate flooring, floor installation, vinyl flooring, how to, do it yourself projects

Id: FMF0JcwSPKc

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021