How to install a toilet flange! Plus finishing up the bathroom flooring! #543

All right, welcome back, everybody. My name's Andrew, and you're watching the Kelly's Country Life. And today, we are gonna be installing toilet flanges so we can continue running flooring in the bathrooms. All right, so I've reached a point in the flooring in this new house that I'm building to where I need to come into the bathrooms. So a lot of you are gonna notice in new construction, you're gonna have, well, a sewer pipe sticking out of the floor just like this. And chances are, it's gonna be either three-inch or four-inch pipe. Now, it just so happens mine are four-inch pipe, and I'm noticing a lot of these toilet flanges, they're combo flanges, so don't be confused when you go and pick them out. They'll say three-slash-four or four-slash-three. So what that means is a three-inch sewer pipe would actually fit on the inside of this, and a four-inch pipe, which is what you're typically gonna see, will fit in on the outside of this. So this will actually slide down into it. Now, the problem is, this is just rough-end plumbing. This was done and capped so we could pass rough-end plumbing inspection. We actually have to get this trimmed off, set at a specific height, and we need to prep the floor to do that. So let's get started. All right, so one of the first issues that we're gonna have is I have built-up concrete around this pipe. Most concrete guys, they're gonna do their best to get that perfectly flat and level, but whenever they're coming up and hitting a piece of pipe, sometimes you'll have build-up there and rough edges. So I am going to use a masonry wheel here. This is actually for concrete and masonry. It goes on the end of an angle grinder. I picked this up for like $12 on Amazon, and we're gonna run it around here before I cut the pipe, knock down these high spots in the concrete, and then we can actually cut this pipe off and get ready to install our flanges. All right, so before grinding concrete and making that dust, I'm gonna wear a respirator. It's not good stuff to breathe, and I'm gonna put on some glasses here. But all I'm gonna do is just run around the pipe, knock down that little bit of high edge in the concrete that we have. All right, so now that we have that concrete ground down around it, I'm gonna cut the pipe off flush with the concrete. Now I know that we're putting in a very thin floor, and you're gonna read a lot on the forums that most people say this flange should be on top of your finished floor, whatever that may be. That could be something extremely thin, like 1 1⁄4 inch thin or less, if you're doing a vinyl plank laminate like us, or it can be very thick if you're doing a hardwood floor. So you need to know at what height your flange is gonna sit in order to be on top of that flooring. There's lots of different ways you can do this. Let me show you how I'm gonna do it. Let's get this pipe cut off first. So I'm gonna use an oscillating tool. Awesome for this job. You could use a long-bladed saw, like a Sawzall, bend it down against the floor, cut it off. Lots of different things you could do to cut this pipe off. But it's just so hard to beat a multi-tool for a job just like this. All right, so now's a good time to take a piece of sandpaper, kinda clean up the edges, because keep in mind, the flange will actually fit down inside of this pipe, so a nice rounded edge to feed it in through will work out good for you. So let me clean this up real quick. Okay, so there's a couple different ways you could go about this. If you know your floor's height, you could go ahead and set your flange in, spacing it up off the floor, whatever height you need for your flooring, or if you happen to have some scrap pieces of flooring like me, you can go ahead and set those down on the floor, glue, push this flange all the way down until it sits on the floor and remove it, but then there's a problem with that. Now, whenever I come out laying my flooring down, I have to notch, I have to slide it underneath this. It's gonna be very difficult to install a flooring. So what I'm gonna do is not install my flange right now, go ahead and run my flooring in the bathroom, actually run it over this hole, and it just so happens I have a large hole saw bit. So all I have to do is find the center of the flooring, cut down right through here, and I have a perfectly cut hole all around the pipe. Then I can install a flange right down in, push it to where it's perfect on top of the floor. Let me show you what we got going on here. So now I have ran the flooring to the point that it's just covering up the pipe. So I found dead center of the pipe. It's four inches inside. So I came over two inches, drew a line up, came over on this way, drew a line up two inches. So now I have two lines that I can bring together for a reference point. Now I have a mark on my board where I can come back later, I know where the pipe is, cut that piece out real quick with my hole saw, and I can insert my flange. All right, so as you can see, the flooring is in, so I'm gonna go ahead and take this hole saw bit, drill down, and take my flooring out. Now keep in mind, you do not have to do this. A lot of times, you'll go ahead and install this before your flooring, or you can install this and run your flooring right up to it, right underneath it, space it out like I showed you. I'm just being a little extra particular here. Just so happened I have the right size hole saw. So I decided to go ahead and run the flooring first, but you don't have to do it this way. You can run up to it underneath your tool. It's gonna cover any gap that you leave around. All right, let's see how this works out. All right, that worked out really well. All right, so now that we have our pipe exposed, we can actually put our glue on and put our flange down in here. But this is where I wanna explain the difference. You see I'm holding two different types of flanges here. I originally started out with this style because it's all I could find locally. It is very hard to find some of these toilet flanges. Actually, I had to order this one offline. And I have been looking and looking for this style, have not been successful. Finally found some today because I decided I really wanna go with this metal ring version. It has a stainless ring. I highly recommend you get this one. There's a couple different companies that make it, Odie and this particular one, Sioux Chief, but they're very, very similar. The cool thing about this one is if you put this one in first before you come lay your floor and work in your home, this one actually has a knockout in it. So if you install this in here like this, well, nothing can fall down in there. And then whenever it comes time to install the toilet, you hit this ring with a hammer, pull it out, and it's ready to go. So it gave you some protection. Here is the key, the big difference between the two. Well, one, the metal ring, I think it's gonna be quite a bit stronger. And two, when you install your toilet flange, your toilet bolts go into these holes right here and rotate around. So you have to be very particular about where you install this flange right here. You cannot install it to where these openings are perpendicular to the wall because that's where your bolts have to drop in and then they need to rotate around. Imagine your toilet sitting here with two holes right here on either side of it. So you have to make sure you offset this flange just a little. So if you were to drop bolts down in here and spin them, they will actually catch on some of this plastic. Now the plastic's kind of the reason I decided, you know what, I'm not going with this style because if that plastic ever breaks, it's kind of very difficult to get out a glued flange. It's possible but difficult. I trust this stainless flange a whole lot more. And here's the cool thing about it. You put it in here any way you want to. Because that rotates, I can now rotate it around and line it up perfectly with the wall to where the toilet will sit and those bolts can go in. So I can glue it in, not have to worry about getting everything absolutely perfect because this glue sets up so quick. Highly recommend, go with the steel flange version. All right, now probably one big drawback of having your floor down first before you do your flanges, well, the glue. You do not want to get it on the floor at all. I doubt you could get it off of this vinyl flooring. So read your local plumbing codes. A lot of them require a specialized purple primer. Believe it or not, some do not require primer even though people are going to argue that fact. I've happened to read our state building code in a non-pressurized pipe up to four inches. If your glue meets a certain ASTM standard, which mine does, you don't even have to use primer. But it's always good practice to use it. And again, your inspector may require that you use a purple type of primer so they can make for sure that you have actually primed it. So keep that in mind. All right, so what I'll do here is put some primer all the way around on this piece of pipe. I'll put it around on the inside of this pipe. And then you immediately come behind it with some of your glue. And go ahead and put it on both pieces. Now you gotta work rather quick here. So I'm gonna go ahead and put this in. And I have a rubber mallet handy. And I want to beat this flange down to just above the floor. It's barely touching the floor right now. Now I can still rotate it around as designed. And your wax ring is gonna actually sit in this flange and up high enough that with this flange spaced slightly above the floor like it is, the toilet's still gonna cover that completely. Now if you don't have a rubber mallet and you're using something that's a little more brittle like this plastic, have you a scrap piece of wood to put over the top of it before you bang this flange down in like you just seen me do. All right, so the good thing about this rotating ring is now these two big open slots right here for my square headed bolts to drop into and slide around. I do not want them evenly spaced off the wall because again, when the toilet sits down, it'll have two bolts right here. So you want that ring slightly rotated off to the side. So when you drop those bolts in, spin them around. Now when you slide the toilet down and sit those nuts down on those bolts and they go to pull up, they're not gonna pull up out of these open holes right here. They're gonna pull up actually on the slots that they're designed to slide into. So just to make for sure that I have everything where it needs to be, we'll do some quick spacing with a tape measure here to make sure I am nice and even off the wall and leaving myself plenty of room for those bolts to slide around in. All right, so what I'm gonna use to drill these holes, this drill actually has a hammer drill function. I'm gonna click over to it and it makes a heck of a racket. And I have a masonry bit right here that happens to be the perfect size for some 316ths and these are inch and three quarter long Capcom screws. These are made specifically for going into concrete. So I'm gonna drill through the floor all the way down into the concrete. You wanna go in further than the screw is, vacuum up because some of that dust is gonna settle in the hole. So you always drill a hole that's deeper and then I'll tighten these down. This is done, this toilet won't rock or go anywhere in the future. All right, I am very pleased with that install and I can assure you we're not gonna have a rocky toilet on this install right here. So I just wanna show you those holes real quick. As you can see, here is the wall and you can see the square slots where the screws drop in. I have positioned it since you want the two bolts that hold the toilet down to be perfectly square to the wall and they need to be in this smaller slot, not these larger slots or the bolt would just pull right up. So that is critical. All right, well, living room, kitchen. This bathroom is done along with that toilet flange. Laundry room and the half bath here with its toilet flange. So all we have left for the people that are watching this with the flooring is the closet there, the bedroom and the pantry. And those are like, you know, not super odd shaped rooms. Shouldn't be much to it. Now, eventually down the road, when we do our railings and stairs, we're gonna do the same floor up there in the loft and I'm actually gonna have to do a lot of floor prep up there, not really looking forward to that. So there will be more flooring later on down the road. Hopefully you all enjoyed this. Hopefully you learned something about installing toilet flanges. I did and enjoy the progress on the floor. We're getting there. Catch you on the next video.