VAN BUILD | FLOORING and WHEEL WELL BOXES | HOW TO

hey and welcome back i'm colton from ankeny van builds and today we're going to be installing probably my favorite thing to install in a van and that is the flooring flooring just changes the entire look and feel of the van it's one of the first things i'm going to be putting in that actually is going to make this place feel like a home so that being said let me tell you all the tools that are required to put these in and let's just jump right into it so obviously the first thing you're going to need is the flooring that you want i decided to go with this applewood laminate flooring one obviously because they're beautiful floors but two things that you absolutely need in a van are floors that are waterproof and scratch resistant so i got these they come in this kind of box it's important when you're storing these to keep them in a temperature controlled area so don't leave them in your garage if your garage isn't heated or doesn't have air conditioning because they like most materials will expand or contract and what you don't want especially for me being that it's almost winter is to store them somewhere cold and for it to later warm up and expand and start to buckle as it gets hotter that's what you don't want to do so we're going to avoid that today and i'll show you how i do that but next up tool wise because we're in a van and nothing is straight we're gonna need a jigsaw to cut some awkward angles and weird uh weird curves to match the inside of the van obviously you're gonna need like everything a tape measure and a pencil a drill with some screws and i'll show you why this is unique to a van you wouldn't really do this when putting floors into a house but i'll show you why later also you're going to need this t-track molding and try to get it in the same style or same pattern as your flooring so it doesn't stick out and in fact on the box it says do not forget your molding okay next up you're going to need some sort of speed square or framing square or really anything with a straight edge to make sure you're getting your lines nice and straight and making sure that your floors aren't crooked in the van because what you don't want is to get halfway through putting the floors in and notice the entire thing is crooked so to avoid that get everything laid out planned out nice and square and then to install it you need a hammer it's better to have a rubber mallet but i don't have one so i will use a normal hammer and a scrap piece of this laminate to to flush these boards together so that they don't move and the last thing that you're going to need is a way to cut all of these so there's special tools that you can buy that snap and cut laminate floors or you could just use a miter saw which is what i have and that's what i'm going to be using oh i also forgot don't make fun of me but these also come in super clutch when it comes to putting in floors because you're spending almost your entire day on your knees and that takes a toll so don't make fun of me but i'm going to be wearing knee pads almost all day today so i got lucky enough that this van came with a factory subfloor already in it so that means it is perfectly flat it is perfectly smooth and i can just go ahead and lay my laminate floor right on top of it if you were to make your own subfloor however it is super important that you get something like a level and you run it all the way across and you check underneath to make sure that there's no high spots or low spots and if you did have any high spots or low spots you got to sand it down to make sure that the the floor is completely flat before you start laying your floor in what you don't want is to have like a dip in your floor so when you put the laminate floors on it that there's a gap in between the floor and the board itself because then you're going to step on it it's going to bend the seams are going to come apart it's going to buckle and it's just not going to look good and it's not going to last so making sure it's perfectly flat is extremely important then once you make sure everything's completely flat i'm going to obviously take this tape out but you want to sweep up everything you don't want any little dust particles or sand or dirt and most likely in between each row that i do i'm probably going to sweep up in between to make sure that every layer that i'm putting in doesn't have any dust so next you need to find a nice straight line that you can use as a reference to start laying all your floors and this ram promaster right here on the factory subfloor has a nice straight line and it goes all the way to the wheel well box over there so i'm going to be using this now typically in a house you can have the board butted up right against the wall and you can use that as a stopper as you hammer in the other boards but because this is like a grooved or a curved surface doing that the whole the boards would bounce up on it it would move and that's why on these boards over here because i know they're going to be covered i'm going to lay them out so they're nice perfectly straight and then i'm going to put some screws into them so they don't move then i can start laying the rest of them and then i'll take the screws out once i'm done so the next thing you want to do is to find your pattern so what i like to do and what the goal is is to not have any of these seams ever lining up so what i like to do is i like to cut them into quarters some people like to do the step down so it's like three quarter half a quarter i like to stagger it like this so that it's an irregular pattern and that way the seams aren't as close in each row so the reason i told you i'm going to be using the drill and some screws to attach this because if i were to lay say this was my next board and i were to lay it down i'd go to put it in and see how it slides and moves around normally in a house you can put it right up against this and it won't move but if i'm gonna be constantly hitting things it's gonna it's gonna move around quite a bit so that's why i'm going to get it lined up nice and neat with the side here so i'll drop some screws in to make sure it's nice and secure another thing i forgot to mention at the beginning is when you get to the end here you want to make sure you're leaving at least 3 8 of an inch off the back because you don't want your board to come all the way to the end since we're going to need a spot for the t-mold track to go and that t-mold is about half an inch and now with that out of the way i can go ahead and start cleaning up the subfloor and start laying some boards down [Music] foreign [Music] okay i cannot be more excited about this check this out these floors look amazing super happy with the design that i picked out now that it's all completely installed this is going to get covered up by the wheel well box everything is nice and flush you can tell my trick of screwing in the floors once i had them all straight worked out really nicely because if you can tell here all the way down it is still perfectly straight that means that all of these lines in the van are perfectly straight and the job is done now all i need to do is get that t-mold put it right in here in these cracks or not on the cracks but on the ends here cap it off give it that nice trimmed out look and the floors are in uh the only tool i ended up using that i didn't include in the very first or at the very beginning in this video was a table saw i used a table saw right at the end to rip those uh narrow strips uh on the slider door side but other than that just the jigsaw the drill and the hammer that's all you need now i don't know if you'll be able to see this with how the the lighting is right now i got the weird shade coming in but that pattern that i was talking about before where you want a full board a half inch or a half of a board three quarter and a quarter here's why because it creates this pattern so you can see the seams and you want those to line up every fourth board so if you can see that it's kind of a minor detail not a lot of people know about it but it's just one of those things that if you get it right it just looks so much cleaner okay good morning it is the next day and i'm going to finish up the floors today i'm putting in the trim work this t-mold stuff and i'm going to build some wheel well boxes so let's just go jump right into it so this t-mold just comes with this aluminum track here and it has these holes already in them so you line those up where you want it and this is why i left that 5 8 inch gap right here because this is half inch wide and i wanted just enough room to drop this in and this t-mold will just snap right into it so and now you can see how that just completely blends in and makes it look nice and neat so that way you're not looking at this raw edge over here so that simple so to get the dimensions of the wheel well box what i did is i got a straight edge and i measured from this back wall out until it's past my my floors here so it gives me just enough clearance to make it out past this wheel well so i put a dot there do the same thing on the other side measured from point to point and from the wall to this point so i got 10 inches here 35 inches to the other one and it needs to be 19 and a half inches tall so i'm gonna go ahead and start cutting some plywood so one really common mistake a lot of people make including myself is when you're building boxes like this you think oh it's 10 inches by 19 by 35 so you start making those cuts at those dimensions but you got to take into account the thickness of the wood so if they're standing up like this and i need a board and i need the box on the inside to be 35 inches i have to take into account the thickness of both of these boards so since both of them are three-quarter inch that should be an inch and a half it's something that sounds really basic but it's something that gets overlooked often especially when you have multiple things that you're doing at the same time it's easy to forget that you need to do that so keep that in mind don't forget it and let's keep going so i got these wheel well boxes cut and put together and i kind of want to show you what i did earlier i said i think i said 19 and a half inches tall that was way too tall uh i ended up going with 16 and three quarter inches tall and then with this uh i'm doing quarter inch plywood on top so that'll make it 17 inches total so forget what i said about the whole 19 inch i don't know where i got that number from but they look good uh i haven't attached them yet let me show you what i did so i used that handy dandy pocket jig so you can see that i drilled all these holes here and i can actually just take it out so i'm planning on attaching it to the floor right here and right down there in those three spots so that way it won't go anywhere and then i added this on top so i could put that quarter inch plywood just to make the top of it nice and low but still have some sturdiness to it i haven't drilled it down to the floor yet because i'm going to take it out paint it and then throw it back in [Music] so i let these wheel well boxes uh dry overnight i put two coats on it because after the first coat you can still kind of see some of the primer it was bleeding through so i put a second coat on let that dry and attached it in and i painted them black and it kind of tells you can kind of tell by the lighting because i wanted it to kind of blend in and be not as noticeable and also the cabinets that i'm going to be putting in are all going to be black paint on the bottom so that will match those cabinets and it will hide it a little bit better but all in all i think they turned out pretty good and that's a wrap guys the floors are in i think they look awesome so i'm gonna end this video here i hope you guys enjoyed it if you did please leave a like down below comment and subscribe hit that notification bell and if you haven't already go follow my instagram because i post daily updates on the van uh anyways see you guys in the next one

Channel: Ankeney Van Builds

Views: 23,690

Keywords: VANBUILD, VANLIFE, DIY, HOW, LAMINATE FLOORS, VAN FLOORS, SUBFLOOR, RAM PROMASTER, CAMPERVAN, HOW TO

Id: EBihIu92rQ8

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020