Kitchen Upgrade With Laminate Flooring

While I was working at the most serene jobsite (see this post :), I was transforming a kitchen by upgrading the flooring to a new high-quality laminate.

Laminate flooring these days refers to a type of flooring that is often meant to resemble some type of wood flooring, even though it is not. It's quite thin and is actually fairly easy to install. There's much less labor involved than with real hardwood or tile, making it a lower-budget alternative.

The flooring actually 'floats' which means it's not nailed or glued down to the subfloor. This is important because the flooring is expected to expand and contract with changes in weather and humidity. For this reason, I left at least a 1/4" gap all the way around the edges to give it room for expansion. This gap is easily covered with shoe moulding.

The change in this kitchen from the old vinyl is amazing. The homeowner is going for the cute cottage look but didn't want to go to the expense of tiling the kitchen. Laminate is a great and affordable choice for quickly transforming the entire space.

This particular flooring was called "Casual Living" from Pergo. I think the homeowner bought it at Lowe's. Anyway, I wanted to report that it went in well and made great connections throughout. With any pre-finished flooring, I think that you tend to get what you pay for most of the time. Some of the less expensive brands tend to have more gaps because they don't fit together as well, at least that's been my experience.

There's a small stairway off of this kitchen that leads down to the basement stairs and the backdoor. Installing the laminate flooring on the stair required a fancy piece of trim called the stair-nosing. The trim has a notch in the back to overlap the flooring and curve around the nose of the step. This trim had to be special ordered and wasn't cheap! However, if you want it to look right, this is the way to go.

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com

Finishing Up the Marble Floor and Steps

I knew when we were first talking about this bathroom project that there would be some interesting details to think about as we proceeded. Adding a set of winder stairs to a confined place in the bathroom was at the top of the list, especially when I heard that the homeowner wanted to cover them with marble tile.

STAIR NOSING
Though marble is a natural stone and is very heavy and durable, it's also somewhat brittle. For this reason it was very important to protect the tile at the front edge of the steps with a piece of Schluter trim. If we didn't do this, it would surely wear down faster or possibly break and crack because of the foot traffic to the back door.

Schluter trim comes in a wide variety of colors and styles depending upon what your using it for. It's great for making transitions from horizontal to vertical surfaces or corners where the appropriate tile trim piece is unavailable. The trim remains permanently flexible so it's great for corners that might otherwise crack over time with just grout or caulk.


You can see a sample piece of the trim I used in the picture. It's easily cut with a hacksaw and then set into the thinset mortar just before I lay the tile. The grout fills the seams between the trim and the tile and provides a very professional looking installation as well as some protection to our lovely marble steps.

MITERED CORNERS
Mitering is a term often used when doing trimwork that refers to cutting the trim at an angle (usually 45 degrees) where the corner pieces intersect. This can be done with tile as well and is most often used where there is an outside corner that is receiving tile. With these stairs, I used quite a few miter joints where the angled pieces came together.


A mitered cut on tile is not difficult provided that you have a tile saw that has this feature. My smallest tile saw is an MK 4" benchtop model and even it will cut miters by raising the cutting platform up to 45 degrees on one side. My larger Felker saw has an attachment that holds the tile at 45 degrees on the sliding tray which makes the cuts fairly simple once you get the hang of it.


The marble floor is grouted and sealed and ready for business. It will be slippery, though, so the homeowner will want to have plenty of rugs for wet feet. :)

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com

How To Install PreFinished Oak Flooring

It's time to install the hardwood flooring in the hallway outside the new bathroom that I added to this home in Donelson. The homeowner wanted to match the hardwood in the rest of the home as much as possible so he picked out some pre-finished 3/4" red oak flooring for me to install.

The process for installation is very similar to installing unfinished hardwood. Here are the basics:


PREPARE
Before you begin, get the hardwood ahead of time and let it acclimate to the humidity inside the home. It's important to have a flat and solid subfloor to install the hardwood over. Over the subfloor I installed 15 lb felt paper underlayment across the floor, making sure to overlap the courses by several inches. Staple it down in a few places and make sure there's not anything trapped underneath that will make a 'hump'.

LAYING THE FLOOR


It's time to install the first piece of hardwood. Measure out from the starting wall and make a chalk line. It's good to use the straightest or longest wall as your guide. In my case, I wanted to make sure the line was parallel to the bathroom wall where I would end up. Select the longest pieces that you have and face-nail the first run in place all the way along your chalk line. It's important that your first piece is straight because it will be the guide for the rest of the flooring.

What's FACE-NAIL? Face-nail means that you nail through the 'face' of the board or the top where it will be seen as opposed to most of the flooring that will be nailed through the tongue so the nails are hidden.

Before I start laying the rest of the flooring I like to sort a batch of it by length. Usually, I would sort a couple cases at a time. You can see in the picture how I would divide it up. This just makes it easier to grab the pieces that I need without sorting through a stack of lumber each time.


With the flooring organized, grab one of the longest pieces and then a series of pieces that are each 6-8" shorter. When you lay them out like the picture above, it will stagger the seams as they are installed. By the way, if you are working with a helper, one of you can organize the stacks and pull the right wood while the other person nails it down.

Here's a trick to measuring the pieces that need to be cut: Take a piece that's approximately the right size (from the well-organized stack, right? :), and flip it around so the tongue is on the wrong end against the wall. Then you can just mark the length on the piece where it needs to be cut. This method will save you having to use a measuring tape for this cut and it will go a little quicker.

For each piece of hardwood, I started at the end where the tongue is and used a small block to make sure the pieces are super-tight. The block is a small piece of flooring with tongues and grooves. Using this prevents damage to the pieces I'm installing. Nailing through the tongue with my angled finish nailer, I work my way toward the other end, using the block as I go to make sure everything is tight.

NOTE: When installing a larger area of flooring, you'll want to use a special flooring nailer. It's better in two main ways: 1) It uses special flooring nails that have 'teeth' on them that makes a very strong bond and 2) It shoots the nails when you hit it with a rubber mallet. The force of the mallet ensures a tight fit while you're nailing.

As you get closer to the wall, you won't have space to use your nailer so that last three courses or so will need to be face-nailed. To get a tight fit, I like to use a couple blocks and then use a small flat bar to pry against the wall and squeeze the pieces together. Make sure you don't pry directly on the pieces you are installing!

The last pieces will likely need to be ripped on the table saw. Consider how wide the baseboard trim will be so you don't have a gap left later.

One of the noticeable differences between prefinished flooring and unfinished flooring is that there will be slightly more imperfections. Before an unfinished floor is sanded and sealed, the small gaps will be filled with woodfiller to hide them. There's also a difference in the quality of some of the brands of hardwoods. The differences are in how well they are milled to fit tightly together. The low-quality (cheap) brands will probably have more gaps because the milling wasn't as good.

I'm not one to tackle installing a whole house of hardwoods by myself, but this hallway was a lot of fun. Mainly, it's just cool to work with finished wood and see the amazing colors and designs in the grain. It looks great and it will last for many decades and more...

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com

Now for the Oak Steps

When I added a bathroom to this home in Donelson I raised the floor from the den to match the rest of the home. That meant that there would be three steps to build going to the den (see this post).

The homeowner has decided to have me add hardwood flooring to the hallway, but before I do that, I need to install the oak treads and risers on the steps.

There's usually a section at the home stores where they sell all kinds of stair parts like the treads, risers and balusters in basic red oak. That would have worked fine, except that these steps were 51" wide.

To find the wider cut treads and risers I went to JeffCo Flooring downtown. It's the super-secret place where the pros shop for hardwood flooring, including stair parts. They had just what I needed.

I started with the bottom riser and worked my way up. These steps will not have any trim on the sides to cover any gaps so I had to be exact with my measurements. I usually cut the pieces a little long and trimmed it to make sure it fit well. I put it all together without any fasteners and then took all the pieces outside for a good sanding.

Some people finish the wood before installation, but I like to install them before I finish. After a healthy dose of liquid nails, the treads were nailed in place with the risers. The top step gets a piece called stair nosing that is rounded on the front, but the back has a groove where the end-tongue from the flooring will fit. The stair nosing is sold by the foot, so you can just buy as much as you need.

I put a little painters tape on the wall to keep from making much of a mess and then applied the stain. These steps were stained with a Minwax color called "Natural". It's nearly the same as just using a clear coat, but I thought it was a slightly better match to the pre-finished red oak flooring that the homeowner wanted to install in the hall.

Letting it dry overnight and lightly sanding between coats, the steps will get two more coats of polyurethane after this stain.

Next comes the hardwood flooring...

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com

How to Remove the Old Tile Flooring

Before we can talk about installing nice new tile, I have to get rid of those pink ones that were (supposedly) stylish a couple decades ago. Let's talk about how to remove tile:

Removing Tile= Muscle + Elbow Grease :)

The difficulty in removing tile depends, of course, on how well it was put down. Sometimes the tiles 'pop' up quite easily, at other times they have permanently bonded with the subfloor and will make for a long day.

You'll need to remove the tiles and any cementboard that may be under them. Often, with a floor, the tiles are directly over plywood or cement. In this case just remove the tile and the mortar and then fill any gouges with self-leveling cement so that you can start with a flat surface for the new flooring.

For my project, the tiles were installed over Durock cementboard that was nailed down over an old linoleum floor. This was actually fortunate for me because if they had used screws it would have been much more difficult to remove.

The trick for my project, if there was any, was to skip the tiles and work on prying the cementboard up. In doing this, the tiles would often break or pop off anyway. I was able to get by with just a couple pry bars and a hammer. If your project is more stubborn you might consider renting a power chisel or getting a floor scraper to help.

Removing tile makes a TON of dust, especially if you use power tools. Make sure to cover everything that you can to contain the dust. I actually made two temporary plastic walls between the kitchen and the rest of the house to try to contain as much dust as possible. (Use painter's tape to attach plastic from floor to ceiling. Clamps may help as well.)

Also, you want to find a nice respirator (dust mask), gloves, eye protection, knee pads and even ear plugs. All that pounding will make your ears ring!

The reward for all this hard work is have a nice surface to work from in laying the new tile. Of course, if you can find someone else to do it for you, that's even better... :)

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com

Laying a Tight Subfloor

In preparation for laying the Travertine tiles at my Eastwood kitchen project, it became obvious that I would need a more substantial surface to support the stone tiles. The framing was fine, however, there was only 3/4" decking + 1/4" sheathing for a total of 1" of subfloor. So, to strengthen things up I installed another layer of 5/8" plywood.

It's unusually satisfying to put down a new subfloor. (A little weird, I know... :) You can feel the change immediately because the floor is so solid now. It also gives me a clean surface to tile over.

I thought I'd share a couple tips on how to get it to fit well. The first thing is to pick the most square wall and start there. With older homes, like this one, finding something square may be a challenge, but it's good to get a good start with your first piece.

Taking accurate measurements is the most important part to getting a good fit, especially in smaller spaces where there are lots of notches to make. Thankfully, I got today's kitchen finished with no 'do-overs'! Here's how:

1. Pick a reference point and make all your measurements from the same point. For example if you have a notch to cut around a cabinet, measure both sides of the notch from the end of the piece that it will butt up to. All the measurements must be 'relative' to the same end of the board. This is a great tip when measuring drywall as well.

2. Keep the square, factory-cut edges for butting up to adjacent pieces. Cut the other end. This way, all the joints will be crisp and won't have gaps. Once you allow a gap, the rest of the following joints will suffer as well...

Remember to use some good construction adhesive to help the new plywood to bond well to the old floor. I used PL400 construction adhesive which is great stuff. Also, don't forget to sweep often. Even a little chip of wood or drywall will make a hump in your new floor and be quite a headache to deal with. This will also help the adhesive to make a good connection.

Stay tuned for travertine!

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com

Laminate Flooring Goes Down Fast

Today I was helping a new friend install some laminate flooring as he gets his house ready for twins. I'm not sure the flooring will help with dirty diapers, but it will be one less thing for the "honey-do" list, right?

Anyway, laminate is a popular upgrade from carpet that is considerably less expensive and easier to install than real hardwoods. Of course, there's nothing like the real thing, but for the price, laminates look great and come in lots of varieties.

Like laying hardwoods, it seemed to work best to start with the 'groove' side toward the wall and work out from there. It's good to come up with a pattern so that all the seams don't line up. I alternated from small/medium/large every three rows. This worked well with the cuts so that we didn't have lots of waste.

The installation procedure goes like this:

1. Take the piece and raise the opposite edge while sliding the 'groove' side under the tongue of the piece you are joining. Don't worry about matching the ends up yet.

2. Once the pieces are hugging tightly, lower it slowly and tap it with a block until they 'click' together. Don't tap on the tongue. Instead, put your block just above the tongue against the top portion of the flooring, being careful not to chip the laminate.

3. With the length joined, use your block to tap from one end until the other end 'clicks' as well.

That's basically it. Repeat for every piece. Some will need to be cut or notched depending on the room's layout. Be careful to make sure you are running square to the walls. You may want to put blocks against the wall because the entire floor will tend to shift as you're working, because this is a floating floor.

WHAT'S A "FLOATING FLOOR"?
Laminate or engineered wood flooring is said to be a floating floor because it is not fastened down to the subfloor in any way- no glue or nails, etc. A slight gap around the edges, covered by baseboard and shoe moulding, allows for expansion and contraction with changes in humidity.

Keep a small pry bar on hand for applying pressure to the pieces when you get close to walls. Make sure you put a wide block under the bar before prying against the drywall or you may add a drywall repair to your project!

Many people find that installing laminate flooring is an easy do-it-yourself project. Today's room took me about 1 day to fully complete. Some tools like a table saw will come in very handy for the last row that is likely going to be a partial width and need to be trimmed.

With this floor down, that grand piano will sound even better.

-Peter

www.CarpentryGuy.com