Part 8 - Vinyl Flooring for Beginners - Building a Tiny Office |

what's up guys I'm Zach and welcome back to Workshop edits and welcome to episode 8 of my tiny office build Series in my backyard today's episode is going to be all about laying down vinyl flooring again something I have never done before in my life required a lot of research and prep on my end but overall it actually very straightforward easy process as long as you follow a couple of rules I hope all the tips that I provide along the way are super insightful so let's go ahead and get started so I'm just going to go through a couple of tips I'll probably give some up front and I'll give some as I go but up front there's a couple of things that you want to think about when doing your flooring one you should always have like 10% more than you think you're going to need just so you have it you've bought it all at the same time and there's no differences in having to go back and like purchase a new set from a different store that might have a different humidity level it'll save you a lot of time and pain in the end you can always return the extra that you have it's 10 mm thick it's has a under lamit protection barrier meaning that I do not need to put down any sort of like Vapor or moisture barrier especially with this build now if you are in a place that is like a first floor on top of a basement or you are on top of concrete or you are like the second floor in a house that is like above a kitchen or a bathroom or somewhere where kind of like moisture can rise and collect you might want to consider adding some type of moisture barrier there's a bunch of different kinds there there's different thicknesses they have different um characteristics like moisture protection sound proofing like if you're on a second floor and a couple other things that you just might want to do your own research on when it comes to like the specific application of your laminate Florine and what that laminate flooring recommends and what it also comes with built into the flooring they often come in repeating patterns so each box that I bought has six different pieces they're 7 and 1/4 in wide by 48 in long and I can tell already there are six roughly six maybe seven different types of patterns so what you want to do is open up as many of the boxes as you think you're going to need for a specific room and actually sort your pieces so that as you're building out your floor you're pulling from different piles so that the pattern itself is sort of as varied and staggered and different as possible like the last thing you want is like two pieces that look the same right next to each other it's just going to end up looking kind of odd now I have the benefit of a new construction building meaning that I was able to strategically place all of my drywall a half in off the ground and anywhere that it was like a little bit lower I just went with a multi-tool and like a half in spacer block and just cut off that bottom so all around my perimeter there is a/ inch Gap this flooring is 12 mm meaning it is just under half an inch now when you are installing this flooring whether it's a new construction or it is replacing a current floor the one thing that you want to make sure of pretty much above everything else is to account for expansion the bigger the room the more expansion you probably have to account for you can buy these pretty cheap kits I think this was like $20 and it comes with all of the tools that you're going to need to account for that kind of stuff so that includes a block that allows you to hammer your pieces together a block that allows you to pull your pieces together when they are buding up against a wall and it comes with spacer blocks now the recommendation for the flooring that I'm using in the space that I'm using if you are up against a wall to add 3/8 in of a spacing around everywhere because what you're going to ultimately do then is put on new baseboards which are usually around half an inch thick and those are going to go ahead and cover those gaps anyway so you're not even going to see them baseboards can be thicker than that there's also a bunch of different methods that you can do to also seal off that Gap that you leave they make rubber foam little tubes that can sort of be inserted in there you can use um 100% silicone culk to also seal that space I don't think I have to do any of that for my application at the most I think what I'm going to do is get the flooring fully installed and then decide maybe I'll add some silicone caulking just to seal those bottom joists and prevent I don't know know moisture buildup or things getting into the spaces or overall just allow this office to have itself like fully sealed off from the outside the great thing is with it being new construction and having that half inch gap on the floor is I can basically put my pieces all the way up against the wall it's going to make measuring a lot easier it's going to avoid me having to use any of those spacer blocks because there's always going to be if it's flush with the exterior or the the interior wall of the drywall there's always going to be a half inch gap between the actual base of the flooring and the studs that you know are exposed down here at the bottom because that dry wall is off the ground so really what I need to make sure I'm doing is just doing everything straight doing a nice varied pattern and not repeating pieces one last thing that I didn't know until I actually got into trying to figure out exactly how it was going to work is when you are doing a transition from a door to your flooring right here they actually sell very specific they're called tea trim pieces they look like this they're come in a bunch of different colors so you can purchase them to match the flooring that you bought as best as possible it's probably going to be not possible to match it 100% what those do is allow you to have a gap in between your flooring and your sliding door your French doors whatever they are and it creates a nice seamless transition between that door to your flooring so I got one of those they sell them in widths up to I think like a little over 6 feet for doors that are up to 6 feet wide and if you're working with a door that's bigger than that you're probably going to end up having to order something custom anyways the best part and I cannot believe this happened is what they ask for is a 1 and 38 in gap between the edge of your first piece of board and the sliding door itself this Gap is exactly one and 38 like a measure State perfect exactly what I need so what that means is for my first row of boards I don't need to do any notching which is amazing like not that that's difficult but it just like it makes the project even easier cuz this is literally just a box if you are buying or if you ordered uh laminate floring vinyl floring whatever they do recommend that if it's coming from somewhere and you can't verify like where it came from you should let it sit in the environment for like 48 hours and if you do that that allows it to sort of adapt to like the humidity in your space and therefore when you install it it's going to be more in tune with the environment and therefore the expansion or the contraction of it will be more negligible than if you install it and like again don't account for the right gaps in things I just bought mine at the store it's down the street for me same weather same relative humidity so I'm going to get to installing I'm not going to worry about that and I also have Expansion Joints like I said with that half inch around everywhere so I think I am good to go but wanted to just say that one last tip that was a ton of information there's other great videos out there that lay similar types of flooring but in differ sized rooms in rooms that aren't new construction they go with slightly different methodology and give different tips that are more specific to their project and their application like cutting around corners and things like that I'll link those I don't want to like overdo it with information in this because I think mine is relatively straightforward and I want to kind of keep the information as simple as possible because I think this overall is pretty simple I am going to take my first row of pieces I'm going to start in a corner and I have not decided if I want my very first piece when I walk in the door here to be nice and centered or I'm just going to start with a full piece in the corner whatever you end up see me doing is where I land on it regardless what I want to do is just rip the tongue off of those three pieces at the table saw so I can start with a nice flat clean Edge it's again not going to be 100% necessary for my situation because I have that Gap already but if you are working with a piece that is going to like butt up against the wall you're going to want to rip that off so that the gap between the wall and the piece is smaller and your trim will cover it or your baseboard will cover it I'm going to go with centered as my first board and what I'm doing I've never done this before but I want to make sure that I'm marking it measuring properly without actually putting marks on the board so I'm just using some green tape to to take some measurements one thing that just occurred to me is that because these are tongue and groove like every material is is that you can't necessarily use the cut off on one side to supplement the cut off on the other side because they have to be oriented a certain way which I know seems obvious but it does mean that the cut offs that I have on each side need to stay on those sides so I should be very strategic about using those cut offs more frequently than not so that I don't end up just with a bunch of cut pieces at the end the other thing that I'm doing just again to preserved material is I'm going to first cut these very first pieces to length on the miter saw and I think that tape also will just help with like making very clean cuts then I'm going to rip the pieces on the table Sal to get rid of that tongue group that way the cut offs from those pieces again can be used for future end pieces and instead of them being waste because I cut off the tongue on them I hope that that's clear just doing a test fit here on this first one just to make sure I'm doing it correctly having this Gap here does make it really nice knowing that eventually anything half an inch inward is going to be covered by baseboard but my measurements look good this is nice and centered so now we can go rip the little Groove at the table saw and start laying these pieces down because these pieces have this underlit on it I don't doesn't slide that well yeah that's much better I'm just going to go slowly because I don't want to scratch the pieces but they also are scratch [Music] resistant all right that cut really cleanly on the table saw and actually it made sense to cut those pieces upside down regardless because on a table saw because the way the blade moves and because at least my saw stop has a zero clearance insert it gives perfectly clean edges these float they're not nailed in like Hardwoods to the subfloor in any way and the weight of it just ends up holding it in place cuz it's quite heavy as you connect all of these boards like I said no need for me to lay down any sort sort of like six mil underlayment these come with it so really we're just putting down the first one and the only thing I want to make sure of is that I do it straight across here basically in line with this front border of the drywall because that is going to then have a nice even space across the sill here it's going to be perpendicular to this wall it's going to fit the T transition piece that I talked about before and it's going to be trimmed out with wood anyways and baseboards after this is a lovely little tool cost about about 10 bucks I talked about it earlier this is going to allow me to pull my Corners together the Space is really tight so I'm going to start over here lay my boards down tap them into place either with this I also read that a regular Mallet could damage the tongue on the pieces so this kit also comes with this block that allows you to use as a spacer in between tap it and because of this gap on the bottom it prevents the um piece from damaging the tongue if you have a dead blow Mallet it works also so let's do this I'm going to do this in real time this is my long middle piece so again these are snaap together boards so I'm going to lay my first piece this isn't the best representation but you can see tall enough to just slide right underneath there so again already have that expansion joint built in in place which is awesome you can see it slides in over here too so there's one board these are snap click together pieces so I read just going at a slight angle get them somewhat attached then I'm going to take this bar just going to put it in place here and lightly hammer it in and that's going to close that Gap over there I'm going to get my last piece that I just cut clean Edge going to do the same thing again go at an angle wow that that goes together really cleanly and it's nice and straight too awesome okay that was easy going to move on to the next row for the start of the second row I'm actually going to use a cut off already or at least I'm going to test it and see how it looks so I'm going to take my piece come in on it at an angle give it just a light tap that seals the Gap here and then just going to push it down take my spacer block all right so what I want to do is grab a piece that I haven't used before I have not used this piece make sure the bottom looks good it also goes without saying but you want to make sure that your floor is perfectly clear of debris so like prior to this I did vacuum everything I also then took my leaf blower and just dusted out the whole shop so the way that I read to set these in place is you're going to do the short end first and then connect it to these pieces and actually I did just add a couple of shims here so that as I hammered it wouldn't want to creep away from me I'll then pull those back out when I go to do my final row so let's tongue side this way kind of get it locked in place too there we go all right I've got four rows done and I hate that tap block it like doesn't work or I'm doing something wrong but I've watched videos and it just doesn't seem to work just seems to damage the tongue and groove which sort of makes the piece pointless my advice is get a scrap piece that no longer serves a purpose that becomes your way to tap in pieces just lock it in and this edge here just becomes sacrificial that is working way better most difficult part is definitely these end pieces but I think I'm finally finding a rhythm here last tip is like if a piece does get slightly damaged do not try to make it work it is not going to fit I've got half the floor done see if I can knock out this other half this room is really small so it's kind of hard to like capture me doing everything but after the third row when I got smart about just using the scrap piece that got so much easier to tap things in place CU what I was Finding was I couldn't hit it hard enough to actually get the pieces to move without damaging them so sacrificial piece all the way when I did get up to the ends you can see I've got this little tiny strip which I think was sort of unavoidable I don't think it's best practice to have such a short piece on the end but what I found was again just cutting this tiny little spacer for me to then put the pull bar around could hammer it in place no problem and now I just need to take the remaining couple of pieces I have rip them into I can't tell what that is maybe inch and a half inch in 3/4 and those will be the final three pieces and the floor will be done so I'll show you what it looks like when I'm all finished all right so we just finished up the floor it looks awesome and I think once I got into a groove of things especially using that sacrificial piece things went really really quickly so the last thing I want to do is finish off this trim piece going from the sliding door to the laminate flooring so I bought this kit and it's a 4 in-one Kit and it actually specifically can be used for connecting two different rooms of flooring together laminate to carpet laminate to tile or hard edges like a slighting glass door to your laminate so I'm not going to need every piece here the installation of this is super straight straight forward all I'm going to do is take this plastic piece then I will snap in this piece into it also cut to length then I can trim around it with the door casing and the baseboards so this is plastic and vinyl super easy to trim this piece it's probably a little hard to tell has this little bump on this side that goes towards the door just make sure there's no [Music] debris I can already tell that I hate this so what I think I need to do is maybe just cut out a nice piece of white oak and use it as just a standalone piece of trim same thickness as these boards or maybe I can do something with the extra scraps that I have but this to me just feels cheap I'll I'll let you guys know what I end up doing I ended up just ripping an extra strip and using some brad nails to secure it and I recognized that one of the things that I said at the the beginning was we should account for expansion this place is really small and there's tons of room for this floor to expand in all Direction so I think just having that there is going to be totally fine it looks so much better what I have before so super happy with how it came out all right so that is going to wrap it up for this episode if you you have any questions about this project materials process some stumblings that I went through or you just want to generally understand where I got some of my information from so that you can combine it with this video and do your own research please feel free to leave a comment and like always I would be more than happy to respond and give you as much information as I can now if you are watching these in real time make sure that you are subscribed to the channel so that you can be around and be notified when the next video in this series comes out if you are watching these later on I will have a playlist linked to every video that is launched right here as well as the next episode in the series right here I'll see you guys next time on whatever it is that I'm building bye