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10 Beginner Mistakes Installing Vinyl Plank Flooring

Feb 27, 2020
Today we cover 10

beginner

mistakes

to avoid when

installing

vinyl

plank

flooring

. I'm Brad from Fix This Build That and the first thing you need to install

vinyl

plank

is a good surface to lay it on and that meant tearing out the old one. rug in this room I'm doing this project at my brother in law Jason's house and for easy removal we cut the rug into strips, now this way you can roll it up and heat it into manageable pieces now that the rug is pressed by the adhesive strips along the wall, but the carpet pad is held in place with staples as you lift the pad, they may come off with it, but you will have to take out the remaining ones with pliers and we cut and roll all the carpet and then tie it and the pad and moved it out of the room, then we were able to remove all the tack strips.
10 beginner mistakes installing vinyl plank flooring
Now these come out quite easily with a pry bar, but they are very sharp, so be careful or wear gloves and now this brings Let's go to our first potential mistake. Okay, so with all the carpet on the padding outside, now we need to make sure that all of the fasteners holding the subfloor are under the surface, so that's something you really need to make sure is not there because that. will transfer to the floor, you can use a flat edge like a scraper or pry bar and run it over all of the fastener heads. Now you see that if it gets caught on something, you will have to sink it below the surface or remove it.
10 beginner mistakes installing vinyl plank flooring

More Interesting Facts About,

10 beginner mistakes installing vinyl plank flooring...

We had some raised nails that we found and we just drove them in flush, but we also found a bunch of screws sticking out and Jason's police dog decided he wanted to get involved in inspecting the screws we found that we just turned when I tried to put them under the surface and realized it was because they didn't hit the joist during installation so we just took them off and removed them, and whoever was

installing

this subfloor seemed to have a hard time hitting the joist that day, third time's the charm . The next mistake is probably more a matter of opinion: Leaving the baseboards installed definitely makes the job easier and is quite common, but you will need a thick cloth to hide the expansion gap and the gap between the height of the bottom floor when you are removing the carpet and I think the payoff of removing the baseboards is worth it for a nice clean look, but let me know in the comments what you think you'd rather put in the effort to avoid the cable or just push for the easy stuff.
10 beginner mistakes installing vinyl plank flooring
Button and we leave it. We used a pool trim tool that works great to keep the board intact and we even gave my niece Natalie a little sweat in her new room. The next time we needed to check the floor to see if it was flat enough. for installing the floor we use a long spirit level to cover different areas and look for drops or humps so we check the level on the floor and what we find is that here we have a good drop and you don't want that because that will mean that the floor it will move and you may have some uneven gaps or at worst some clicking when you step on it because there is a gap between a hit on the subfloor and when you step on it, it will come down to fix the we dip into the floor we use a layer thin that Jason had left over from a tile job, the floor patch is a better product to use here, so if you're buying a new bag, go ahead and grab it, you'll be able to remove it much easier. and we laid out the thin joint and ran a strip of wood through it to level it, although that piece didn't work very well, so it turned out to be much larger, as you can see, we started here and realized that the dip as It spread completely and the problem was that I was using this small ruler that didn't completely reach the slope, so when we got out we saw that it was getting bigger and bigger with the floor fully prepared, we were able to start installing and since we were starting on the corner where the door is, we needed to set up our transition now we are using a tea molding transition that fits into a metal channel.
10 beginner mistakes installing vinyl plank flooring
I marked the U-channel to fit the doorway and Jason cut it to size with a hacksaw. While I was cutting the carpet and padding out of the way, there were some sticky strips going into the hallway, so we used the multi-tool to cut them out and then I was able to install the U-channel, but not before an unannounced inspection by the copper. apparently things look good so I put the channel in place and screwed it to the subfloor and this brings us to mistake number four of not undercutting the door jambs and moldings and with the u channel in place I was able to tell how much I needed to cut the molding.
Down I used the multi-tool and a piece of scrap

flooring

to cut it flush. If you don't undercut the molding, you'll need to trace the floor around that molding and use caulk to cover any gaps you may have. This is not like this. It will look good and stick out like a sore thumb. Starting at the left corner of the longest wall near the door is a good rule of thumb, but with four feet playing, you don't want to end the row with less than an eight. inch piece and you can avoid this by adjusting your starting point.
Here's a quick example using our bedroom, the length of the first row is one hundred and forty-one and a half inches dividing that by the length of our table of forty-seven and five-eighths of an inch shows that we could fit a little less than three boards in that row, but what if that row was one hundred and forty-five inches? Then we would have a small piece left at the end and to fix it we could cut the first board shorter. so cutting ten inches from the first would extend the last by the same ten inches, that's how you can avoid small pieces at the end of any row and we vacuumed the floor to remove any dust and debris and then started laying the first row.
The board fits and locks and with a few hits of a rubber mallet the joint locks. The third board in the row had to be cut as we calculated above and instead of measuring the cut it is easier to flip the board and push. the end against the spacer on the wall, then you can mark just where that cut should be, just remember to turn the board inside out so you don't cut the wrong side. Now we are using Jason's miter saw for all the straight sides. However, for full width cuts he had to flip the board because the capacity wasn't big enough for these plants, but you might be thinking, hey, I don't have a fancy miter saw so I can't do this right, that's the mistake number 6 The beauty of vinyl flooring is that it can be cut with a wide variety of inexpensive tools.
In my first video on installing vinyl plank flooring in my laundry room, I showed how you can cut the planks to the desired size by scoring with a utility knife and splitting them along the line below the door trim cut. It can also be done with a handsaw instead of a multi-tool, and that same saw or handsaw can also be used to cut vinyl, so don't let a lack of fancy tools be the reason to stop you. As of now, the first row assembled, we slid it against the wall in one piece against some quarter-inch shims we cut from the damaged boards, but we had some unevenness in that wall we had to deal with.
We added some adjustable plastic shims. that come in the floor installation kit we were using to deal with that uneven wall just below this installation kit as well as making the exact floor I'm using and all the tools for this job including inexpensive options for the second row. We cut a board in half to start, which would give us a nice stagger in the front row. At this point, the boards begin to fit together on both the long edge and the short edge. I find it easiest to put the long edge on first and secure it securely in place using a mallet and tapping block, then the short edge can be locked with a mallet and a few taps on the end of the board will close any gaps you have and we made our way to the third and fourth rows staggered. the seams of the first boards by at least eight inches and you'll notice that I wasn't completing full rows at this point because we wanted to take care of the corner by the door first and make sure there weren't any problems there and the fifth row needed to have a notch to fit around that corner using a stud square that we measured and marked for the cut and luckily that board we cut had a good size strip that would go to the wall and now we just cut it with a jigsaw. there was a thin splinter in that board, we may have had to cut the first row to fit it and make sure we didn't have any problems installing the next rows, after that we started filling in the rows we left open, but that led to Mistake number seven, which I didn't even realize I had already gotten right, just as we finished this I realized I actually messed up the design on the first one, so this is what will happen if we put a whole piece together here. would come right here and what you want to do if you're going to get to a corner like this you really want a whole piece to go between the corner and the wall because that way it's going to have a lot of structure so In fact, let's pull this out and you can see how easy it is to take it out and if you have a problem you can just take it off and go ahead and fix your mistake.
We separated the board row by row until we got to the one with that far corner, we installed a smaller board at the front of the row and this effectively pushed the rest of the way down and left us with an almost complete piece at the end after cut that board to the length we could fit. the corner of the notch and Jason cut it out with a jigsaw, but as he installs the piece you can see how that small cut is now supported for the entire length of the board. This is much better than a small floating piece tied at the end.
I placed a couple more rows using the scraps at the end of one row to start the next. This does a great job of getting the staggering right and throughout this entire install we did our best to avoid mistake number eight, which is placing a similar pattern below. each other instead of working directly from the boxes, we unpacked the flooring in a space near the bedroom, stacked it in eight different piles, one for each different pattern, and as we installed the flooring, we kept rotating the different piles to try Keep similar patterns at least one board away keeping this in mind will help you avoid a potential eyesore.
Later we walked across the room to the closet door and this was easy enough to fix, although we just measured where it was sticking out. It turned out to be and we cut a U-notch in a board and slid it into place and now we were finally able to get into a slot and lay down more than two rows before we ran into a problem we had to fix and while we're doing this, let's talk about The Sponsor of today Skill Share Skill Share is an online learning platform where you can learn from thousands of classes covering a wide range of creative and business skills.
A premium membership gives you access to all of these classes that you can use to develop your skill set. Explore an area you've been curious about or even learned how to design that room you just put new flooring in. They have a class called Designing Your Space by Emily Henderson and it provides creative tips and techniques for interior design. She covers how to identify her style. to a color palette and how to mix styles for a guy like me who wears blue, black and gray. It was interesting to hear her ideas and learn how to branch out into some different styles, maybe one day I'll reach that color wheel.
You can get an annual subscription for less than $10 a month, and to see if it's right for you, Skill Share is offering my viewers a two-month free trial, just head to the link in the description to check it out and see what they have to offer. help you learn thanks Skillshare now when we got to the back wall we ran into a vent in the floor and we made mistake number nine and this vent landed right in the middle of the width of our board which was cool if you know would have overlapped a long edge, we really couldn't have avoided that, but what we really want to do here is adjust where it hits along the board, so we cut and installed a board before the vent so we would have at least twenty centimeters before. the vent when we started that new board we used a right angle carpenter's square to transfer the vent location where we needed to cut into the board keeping the cut away from that short edge helps keep the integrity of the locking system intact and also looks Better, in my opinion, we made the cut using the multi-tool again.
This can also be done by drilling a starter hole and using a jigsaw or jigsaw.traction. After the cut, the vent fits perfectly into place and Jason actually replaced it. Later, with a nice nickel finish cover for the last row of this bump, we need to cut the boards into some narrow strips to fit. We did this by using the jigsaw again against a T-square we had clamped to the board. You can also cut this with a hand saw, circular saw, or better yet, a table saw if you have one. We put the pieces together and had to use a pull bar to tighten them.
Now this is the same bar that you've seen us use. at the end of the way to tighten those boards too, we ran those thin strips to the end of the ledge and then went back to using full width pieces to finish the room, now Jason hammered those last rows and it looked great and we went back to the entrance and we install the transition strip in the channel. Although the last plank was a little lower than the carpet in the hallway, the transition worked perfectly and kept it tight in that U-channel, the largest one. The question I got in my last video was why I didn't use any underlayment, simply because I didn't listen correctly, that's mistake number 10.
This product has the underlayment built into the back and does not require an additional barrier; It actually voids the warranty if you use one so follow the manufacturers recommendations and do what they say instead of listening to people in the comments now Jason will replace the sockets as I mentioned above but here's a look at how nice it will look without using the cable and we only had one step left for the final inspection. Everyone came to see the new floor and loved it, especially Natalie, in the next few videos, I have a playlist ready for you right there.
I have made some other installs that you might like, you are not subscribed to the channel, go ahead and do it if I won it and until next time and build something else that is

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