A Laminate installation:

Step by Step:

 

Summary of why I changed the flooring

So I had a couple of rooms in our home we bought in 2007 that had carpet.  The rest was laminate and tile.  While the two rooms didn’t look horrible when the house was shown I had no idea the dilapidated and stained condition they were actually in.

Underneath the yellow bedroom bed was a huge an ugly pee stain probably from the previous owners dog.  In the other room there weren’t any visible stains but the whole room had a slight musty odor that got worse when it rained. . . .yuck!

Step 1:

Select Your Laminate

www.lumberliquidators.com is a good place to start and you local hardware store.

Don’t forget to check your flooring under the most often used light!  If it’s a small room with florescent lighting you want to look at it in a small room with florescent lighting.  If it has lots of windows you need to check the floor in a room with lots of natural light.

Heck get a sample and bring it home.

Just so you know I followed none of those steps this time around!  🙂

We bought the floor sight unseen except online pics and went and picked it up.

Step 2:

Remove your existing Flooring

You may need:

1. A Utility Knife or Pocket Knife – the $2 razor blade knives at your home store should do fine, know that if it’s dull you’ll take 3 times as long and risk cutting yourself, replace the blade before you begin!

2.  Pry Bar:  A pry bar or crow bar is best to pry up the tack strips and may be combined with a hammer to get leverage if the tack strips are especially difficult

3.  Work Gloves:  A good pair of thick work gloves will protect you from the tack strip and other debris don’t forget to wear these.

4.  Floor Scraper:  While not mandatory can be used in place of the crow bar and is great at removing adhesive under the pad.  These come usually as separate 3 to 4′ solid steel construction with an attachment to screw onto a standard extension pole either.  I used a 6 foot one I purchased at Lowes.

For me I was removing carpet so I’ll be mentioning the best way to do that.  First know that in general carpet is going to be affixed to a pad and glued or free layed down to the underfloor or concrete in my case.  In order to give the carpet the clean straight look there are tack strips affixed to the edges of the room to pull the carpet in place these are the most difficult thing to remove but still not hard.

Evaluate the Room and start at the edge of the room about 4 to 5 feet from the wall to give yourself an easily manageable roll.

The roll method is easiest, if you want to save a piece for scrap this is the time to plan that out.  Cut from the wall parallel to the other wall.

You’ll have to pull pretty hard to remove the carpet from the tack strip but once you cut it you’ll have a handle to pull it!  Be sure to wear thick work gloves to help protect you from the tack strip and other debris!

Repeat that process with the pad, don’t be surprised it will probably be glued down in places you’ll need to use a knife or scraper to remove that later.

Tack Strip Removal is tough but not impossible, be persistent get in-between the base and the strip start at the edges.

You’ll notice I took the opportunity before I pulled up my pad to paint my room since I didn’t have to worry about covering the floor and I sure didn’t want to get paint on the pretty new floor!

If you are changing the color of the room now is a great time to do it!

Step 3

Leveling and Filling Holes and Cracks in the Subfloor

Tools You will Need

1.  A Floor Level at least 24″

2. Caulk Gun

3.  Concrete Patch for your Gun – Or Whatever your need to Repair your Subfloor. (Wood Patch for Wood etc. . . )

Yep that Tack Strip has come back to haunt me a bit, look at that hole in my concrete!

 

As you can see I wasn’t too careful using my pry-bar and I accidentally pulled up a chunk of my concrete foundation when prying up the tack strip! Yikes.

At this time it’s a good idea to check your flooring instructions and see what the level needs to be for the floor.  In general you need to be within a 1/4 of level throughout the floor for the installation to be within tolerances but you need to check your individual floor to make sure.  I didn’t photograph this step but in general you’ll take 4 to 6 level checks at least from each edge of the room , you are looking for any case where the floor dips or has low or high spots greater than tolerance, if it’s out of level the floor may not hold and could come apart over time and traffic wear.

Fortunately my floors are pretty true and I haven’t had to level them, if I did I would use Self-Leveling Concrete from the home store and pray I did it right!

But patches and cracks are a hole other matter!

Pick up an appropriate Concrete or Wood Patch depending on your floor from your hardware supply.  I used a standard concrete epoxy since I’m in an interior ground level floor, no major water issues here to worry about so if you are installing a laminate in a basement make sure to get the right patch for your sub floor!

After applying enough patch to fill the hole I used a standard putty knife to fill the cracks and holes.

After using the putty knife this is what one of the cracks look like, they usually only needed a single pass, but the large cracks like I showed above I had to wait for the patch to dry then check it again as my patch shrank just a little bit so I had to refill the holes at least once!

What’s that black stuff you say?

Ahh I still am not certain but I’ve heard that it was a popular sealant and termite repellent in the 1960’s when my house was built  I tried the first time to remove it because I had grand plans to stain my concrete!  🙂 Yep that didn’t work. . . I hear a professional or determined DIY’er can do it but I didn’t have any luck with what I tried, but that could be because that stuff had probably been there for 50 years.

In the case of laying laminate, if it doesn’t cause the level to be of more than 1/4 inch than your good, mine was layed on thin and I had my scraper to thin off any high spots so I was good!

Step 4

Put down the underlayment

I had about 140′ of underlayment left over from my first run so I thought I had about 200′ That meant a run to the hardware store after I started but overall not a hard thing to do.  Be sure and get what you need, the stores have underlayment and pad and plain underlayment so get what you need, your laminate may need a pad depending on what you purchased, mine had a 3mm pad built in so I only needed the water proof underlayment ‘plastic tarp’

So why do I do an underlaymnet?

Because believe it or not concrete is porous, water vapor makes it’s way up underneath the floor and can cause damage to laminate and I have a elementary school child and two dogs so I have plenty of liquids coming from above the last thing I need is water from underneath ruining the floor!

I use a DIY Network trick and leave the underlayment long at the edges of the room, the reason for this is that it’s easy to trim with your utility knife later in one fell swoop and not have to worry about being perfect, this pic shows a place where I layed out the underlayment pretty square but the edges is where I cut it quick and left it long to trim it later right before putting on the shoe molding.

Step 5

Putting down your floor

Tools

1. Laminate Push Bar (These come in kits from your floor location or hardware store they have an edge that goes down and up on the other side with padding on one side of the bar.

2.  Laminate Guide Block (These contain a matching cut out for the laminate locking strip so you can attempt to tap the laminate in place without damaging it.

3.  A Rubber Mallet

4.  A Hammer

5.  A Cut Saw or Mitre Saw (10′ is minimum here but you’ll have to flip the laminate to cut both sides a compounding 12′ mitre can do it in a single cut if you have it.)

6.  A Handheld Power Saw or a Table Saw is easier if you have one

7.  Spacers small spacers or shims to give the floor room to move

8.  Hand Saw or a Drywall Saw works well

Remember most all laminates should have been laying flat in the home and near the room you will install in or at least a very close temperature and humidity to the installation location for 24 to 48 hours.  This varies based upon the floor so check your installation instructions.  Ours sat for a few days since I was doing this myself.

Start at the far corner of the room, usually you work from left to right and you start with cut piece not a full piece to give an offset and provide for greater stability.  As you lay your first row you’ll need to have a measurement of the room then divide by the width of the laminate to see what the final piece is going to be.

Why you say.  Because the laminate needs at least a 3″ width to hold correctly and to look right , if you cut it smaller than that it will look a little crazy and it won’t hold well in place long term.

If you need to you’ll trim this first row, now is the time.  Be sure and trim the correct side, in this case on my laminate it is a longer side because it actually sits the tongue into a longer bottom edge.   I use a universal guide attachment to my power saw, this gives me a guide to use and I can make a cut like a table saw somewhat without having one since I don’t do a lot of wood working nor rip cuts.

Don’t forget the spacers, use these to allow the floor to float and move as it contracts and expands.  Install at a diagonal angle for the second row to lock it in place it should sit flush next to the first row and lock in place.

Cut around odd objects and fit into the corners by cutting out the baseboard.  This one wasn’t well done and in fact after I layed the floor I pulled it up and redid it ! Ahh don’t do that if you make a mistake fix it! Don’t lay the floor you will not be able to take out just the messed up piece it all lays down in a pattern.  In my case my closet doors are closing two panel on a hinge with a single fixed point on the bottom hidden under the underlayment and a sliding rail along the top (not pictured)  I tried in the other room just to take up the floor piece then reattach it higher on top of the laminate.  The attachment went well!  But setting the doors was now impossible the 1/4 higher that the laminate made the floor was too much and the doors just would not go into place.  To fix it I know I either have to cut out the floor or take off all the door hardware and shave a 1/4 off the end and re-attach everything.  This time I choose to cut around it, I’m not sure which will be more work in the end. . .   🙂 Every job is different and this really was the hardest thing I did besides laying down the floor and deciding it was good enough before Thanksgiving then coming back and picking it up fixing the “good enough” cuts and relaying it later!

This is what it looks like at least in my room after laying it all and before putting in the final shoe molding.

You’ll be checking along the way and tapping the laminate into place.

I had one final piece after I attached the threshold come out.  Unfortunately I had already put down my shoe molding so I couldn’t tap it as usual but I found my rubber mallet reseated the floor completely!

Step 6

Installing the Shoe Molding

1.  A Nail Punch

2. Hammer

3. Wood Putty

4. Paint of selected Trim

For the shoe molding I’ve done both ways coping and 45′ mitre cuts, since I’m painting my molding I can do either and they both work fine.  I think I ended up preferring the coping just from looking at it but I didn’t take time to make either perfect,

45′ mitre cuts are popular but there is a gap by default when you do that if you cope the joints there isn’t much of a gap or if you take your time there is no gap.  I don’t have close ups for you to compare but you can make your own cal.  I used painted white molding so I really could get away with not taking the time to make it perfect since I just used wood putty to fill the imperfections and painted over the spots.

You can start this anywhere but I started where I had a long run to put down my 8′ stick of shoe molding then I cut out the cope and layed it in place and actually used a coping saw then my pocket knife to whittle it as close to perfect as I wanted to lay it in place.

I attached the molding with 1 1/4 finishing nails into the base molding NOT into your new Laminate!  Remember it is a floating floor it is designed to move if you attach your shoe molding or base molding into your laminate it can’t move and you’ll regret it!

 

After you nail in into the base molding use the punch to finish it below the flush molding level then you can fill with putty after it is done.  Once you paint or touch up paint the floor and molding is finished.