SwissTrax Flooring Installation Step-By-Step | Tips, Tricks & Real-World Walkthrough

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from dirtfrj.com. How do you turn a garage space like this into a beautiful and functional space like this? I'll show you how it's done. Stay tuned. Hi, Dirt Farmer J from dirt farmerj.com. In this episode, I'm going to show you how to install one of these beautiful flooring systems from Swiss Tracks. We're going to take you through the planning and ordering, installation, and some tips and techniques [music] along the way. Well, let's get started with how you plan your floor using their online tools. So, how do we know how to lay out all of the materials we have to get the desired results? Well, I use the design tool at swiss.com and I simply input the garage dimensions. Took me about 10 or 15 minutes. And you can input all sorts of irregular shapes, uh, large shapes, small ones, whatever. That tool allow you to do that. And then you go to their library where you can pick up a lot of pre-esigned ones, certain patterns, racetracks, checkerboards, that sort of thing. Or you can start from scratch. In our case, we chose these three colors. I want to use this really, I call it quirky and cool teal color to kind of play off of the seafoam color of our home. uh and to bring that into the garage. So, we have those three colors represented on this diagram here. And as you can see, there's a notch in the corner. That is the stairs that lead into the house uh that are off on your left. And then these two views down here are low straight on views. One from the back wall looking out to the door, the other from the door of the garage looking to the back of the garage. And using these tools as reference, we're going to get it right the first time. And that's how it's done. Okay, now that we have all the supplies on hand along with our chart of how to lay it out, let's go ahead and get the space ready. We're going to begin by blowing everything out, kind of doing a double take on all of it to get it cleared and ready to go. And then uh we're going to start the install. So, we're going to leave the large objects in place and we're going to set up a table with some of the provisions ready to go just to make it easier so we're not having to stand up and get down our knees. so often. So, here we go. All right. Well, let's look and see what we're going to be covering over. This slab's about 25 years old. It has moderate wear. You can kind of see over the area where typically one of our vehicles is parked. There's soil on the floor. Uh it's in pretty good shape. But here's the cool thing about the Swiss Track flooring system. We're simply going to cover all this. We'll do another blow out just before we install. But I don't need to do anything more to this. This floor is ready. Now, when it comes time to break apart the bundles, and these bundles come with six tiles in it, you have this poly strapping uh banding around this. Sure, you can reach and get a utility knife and cut all these, but you don't have to do it. Here's a little trick here. If you turn this up on the bottom side and you look for the overlap, just turn this over like that and you'll see a flag sticking out. Grab the flag, pull it apart, and it'll break. Okay, let's do it again just to show you that I'm not fooling with you. Grab the flag, pull it apart, and bam. Then those go off to the trash. Easy way to get them ready to go. Here's something that Swiss Tracks did that's ingenious when they designed the Rib Tracks product. If you look straight on at the color, it's all the same color. So, if I show you, no matter what color I'm using, the blue that I've got here or that teal look, it all looks essentially the same color until you change the vantage point. And so, if I take these and put them in a low angle, see what happens? You see two apparent colors. These two match and those two match. You're looking down the grooves on these two and you're looking across the tops on this tube. This gives a complimentary color that shows up throughout the floor and essentially makes you have if I have three colors of tiles here, I end up with six that look that way on the floor tile with all complimentary colors. It's ingenious. Let's go ahead and explain really quickly how these tiles work. They're meant to snap together and they use a peg and loop system. And if you look here, let's just use this teal colored tile to give you an example. Here you have a set of loops here and the adjacent side will have it. Never opposites, always adjacent. On the other two adjacent corners, it looks like there's nothing going on. And that's because everything that's happening is underneath. So when I turn those up this way, you'll see a series of pegs right here that those loops on the adjacent tile is going to connect with. And notice those pegs go around that adjacent corner as well. So these all snap together. Let's put it in action. So we're starting with a side that doesn't have any loops and I'm putting it to a side that does have loops. So I'm just going to align the corner, the back corner in this case. And I just pop it in. There's six loops and pegs right there. That's now a join. I'm going to come down to the next section. Do the same thing. Put it right here. Pop it together. And now you can see that the whole thing is latched together and this is free floating. We're ready to go to work. All right. The first thing we're going to do is go ahead and put in the first starter tile. Now, this starter is key. It has to be in the right position because if it's turned any other way than the way it's specified, it really complicates the the uh installation. You're having to lift sections to get tiles under other tiles. So, the correct way is just to know where you are. Situational awareness. To your right is the front of the door, the outside. To your left is the back of the garage. I'm on the left side facing out. And over behind you is the right side. To orient the tile here, what I'm going to do is take one straight edge and put it to the front towards the door. One straight edge and put it towards the left wall. So, it's going to go in just like this. So, we're going to go ahead and put it in position, hold it off the wall a little bit, and then we're going to move to our second tile. And we've conferred with our layout map, so we know right away which ones are which. And we're going to just go ahead and lay in the next tile. Put that in. And I'm going to put a third one in just real quick. And we've got our starter course going. What we're going to do at this point is go ahead and put three rows together. Then we're going to show you the next step to make sure it's placed in the right way and any notching that has to be done with any obstacles that stop us from gauging where the floor needs to be set in relation to the door. All right, let's go for it. Okay, we've now gotten three rows down. I got to say, it's getting exciting. We're really moving along at a quick pace [music] here, and the colors really pop. So, the next thing we need to do is adjust this row of flooring away from the wall. These are plastic. So, if this uh tile is hard against the perimeter wall of the garage and hard against the other side, opposite the garage, and hot weather happens, these are going to grow. So, you're going to get a buckle in the middle. And then on the other hand, if there's too big of space that you put along the side, you end up with a kind of a big gap. Fortunately, in our setup, this gap along this side is down under the counter. So, we don't have to be super precise. What we do need to do is give about a/4 to 3/8 in gap along the side against that wall between the wall and the edge of the tile. And a quick way to do that is to play a little game of hopscotch. Here we go. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to get right here and I'm going to jump forward. And I saw it move down there. Let's just see what happens. And I should have that 3/8 or 1/4 inch down here. Let's reach it. Perfect. So, we're not hard up against the wall. There's a nice gap. This will all float. Now, the next thing we need to do is put on the ramps on the front along this edge that are really color matching. This beautiful blue. We'll put those ramps in and then gauge where it is and position the door. And the tracks that are on the garage door are actually colliding a little bit down here. So, we'll have to notch them using either a multi-tool, a jigsaw, skill saw, coping saw, something like that, just to move that in to get in the right position. Let's go to it. Okay. Okay. We've now put all those uh trim edges on the front, the ramps on the front. The next step is we're going to go ahead and lower the door. being able to position this section in to the correct position under the door gasket. Okay, let's roll down the door. All right, this is beginning to be really fun. You can see we got our three reference rows, front edge, uh we've notched everything we just talked about if you need to do that. If you don't, you're back at this step here. And if you look down in the other side there, you see the three tiles against the wall. Those are set in reserve. Those will be our fill pieces. It'll be custom cut to maintain that 1/4 in distance around that side as well for uh contraction and growth depending on temperature uh and that sort of thing. Now, we're going to start over here, and we're going to start here on the left edge uh of putting in uh the row one row at a time. Now, look at me. I'm a little bit older. I don't want to get on my hands and knees and stand up. Hands and knees, stand up. Hands and knees, stand up. Each time we put a row by putting one back under these suspended cabinets. So, we devised a little bit of a shortcut, a cheat, if you want to call that a hack, whatever you want. Uh we're going to actually build a strip of the starter row uh with the alternating pattern based on what we have right off our pattern sheet. And now that gives us this edge right there each time. No standing up and sitting down, standing up, all that. We can just lay these in really quickly. We're going to get a lot of square footage quickly. Hey, let's jump in. Okay, we've now built our whole starter strip. In this case, we chose eight sections. I'm just going to slide it back in, connect it together, and check the reveal along the wall. All right, let's check our reveal. Perfect. All right, we're ready to start building. Okay, we have a couple of approaches we can do here. If we use the standard directions, what we're going to do is just do an individual row here and work across all the way here. Now, for dummies like me that get things really confused easily. If you look at this pattern, you can see there's a raceway that goes around it. And where we are right now is right up in this corner. What we're choosing to do just to simplify it and get it out of the way, we're going to go ahead and lay in this special border here several rows back. So now this field right here of just the standard teal and uh white checker board can all be laid in very quickly, at least till it hits the other border on this raceway that we put there. So that's the alternative method. If you want to stick to the standard method that they show you, either one's going to work. We're just kind of dummy proofing it for us. Okay, we're almost done. The only thing we're going to do now is put in that last row along the back. It'll leave about a/2 in gap in our layout, which is close enough. That's just about right between the edge of the tile [music] and uh the wall itself. And then the final pieces along the left side, that is looking in from the garage door into the interior along the left side. You saw us provision those tiles there earlier. Now, all of those are going to be cut to shape. [music] And you can check out in the playlist below, in the link below, how we did some special things like cutting around obstacles, uh how to lift out a section if you need to clean something or get something [music] turned around or something gets damaged along the way. Uh all that is shown there. [music] And we are going to love this floor. We've already gotten a lot of compliments from it. We already do love the floor. It's fun to walk on. It keeps clean really nice. Feels good under the feet and sock. uh feet when we're out there as well. So, uh we think you're going to like it, too. Now, in case you're wondering, no, we don't make a commission, nor do we get paid uh to get you to like their product. Uh when we find something great like this, we love to get the word out. And you can check them out at swissrackas.com and look at their online tools there for planning um not only the dimensions of the space but also different patterns that they have presets and there's a great idea gallery there. If you're just going I'm paralyzed with possibilities. There's way too much to look at here. Then you can look in their gallery and you'll find some really cool ideas [music] that I'm sure one of them will be very very appealing to you. So, thanks for being with me today. Check out this video where we do show you how to do those special cuts along the edge there. Uh, and that'll be a great tip, a tile setter tip, uh, and technique that is used right here for this type [music] of tile as well. You'll like that. And while you're at it, check out this other video that YouTube thinks you're going to like. We think you're going to like it, too. Hey, until the next time, this is your farmer Jay loving our Swiss track floor.