Watch This Before Installing laminate

we're talking flooring today and I'm super excited about it the reason why is in this cabin that's almost 2,000 ft we have many rooms many transitions there's a lot of snow in the ground and today we're going to be installing flooring number one with no transitions except for like the bathroom and number two making sure it's waterproof so we can deal with all the junk that comes this way and at the same time we're going to save a whole bunch of money let's get started all right guys let's talk flooring there's tons of different options out there but the most traditional ones are hardwood flooring laminate flooring or LV P also known as luxury vinyl PL apart from Price Point there's a few key characteristics that are graded within the type of flooring you want to choose there are five basic characteristics between laminate and lvp flooring those being core water resistance scratch resistance durability and appearance I'll be completely honest with you with advancement of flooring technology a lot of these characteristics are really comparable to each other but there are two that stand out the most that being core and water resistance and the reason being is the material or the core that they're made out of with laminate flooring you have a composite core that means it's kind of like a dense MDF if you will and we've all worked with MDF that sucker when it gets wet it soaks it up swelling up your floors and uh that's not a good day for anybody with lvp the core is plastic so you don't have to deal with anything getting absorbed now with water resistance because we're dealing with a wood composite material that is going to soak up like a sponge when it comes to laminate flooring however with lvp we're not dealing with wood so plastic is going to take our flooring in to a longer lasting lifetime this is by far one of my most favorite flooring to use this is my second time doing this stuff and I'll tell you why it's so great number one it's easy to install number two it's waterproof because how tight the seals are number three you don't need an under layment save a bunch of money cuz it has the cork underlayment below my only problem with this stuff is I'd like it to be a little bit thicker but everything else so far it's fantastic let's get started whenever you do own flooring you got to establish where you're going to start typically you want to come at an entrance if you have a front door the line should start going vertically in front of you not horizontally our entryways for the mudroom so we're going to start in this side of the wall because we actually have a nice flat wall that we're going to work our way out this way and get into the hallway versus starting midh housee and then move to the sides that's chaos in order to start your first line what we'll need to do is first have our long piece the next piece is going to be a 3/4 long piece so that's going to get chopped off there and the last piece is going to be a 25 perent well a third technically could be the math once we get that started that'll be able to break up any kind of patterns kind of like camouflage and continue our lines out and the good thing is when you cut these pieces off do not throw them away put them against the wall cuz you're going to use them on the other side that's okay we want to get ourselves a straight line I'm going to have to throw some wedges in there so this doesn't get pushed all the way in there you want it to be floating you don't want to start nailing or gluing it down cuz if you do you got to do the whole entire thing this is called the floating floor once we put our wedges in there we're going to take our large tongue and our small tongue lift our small tongue on top get them in place everything's nice and sealed and just break it down there do the same for our small piece we got our flooring started I've actually never done this I mean I've used wedges but these are from tile and they always fall down I'm going to try to put like one Brad nail and see if they'll stay oh that's perfect so what that'll do is once we've got our line started because we know this line is completely flat with the rest of the house when we push our flooring against it we're going to keep that straight line without having to go underneath this drywall making sure nothing gets out away now I'm not too worried about this section here is because we're going to have cabinets here when flooring you can have two options either install them before your cabinets or after your cabinets before the cabinets it's nice and easy and you don't have to stop anywhere and you don't have to do finishing touches when you do it after the cabinets well that's where you got to start trimming things off and covering them up this way we're going to waste a little bit of money on a few pieces but end of the day I'd rather get this in now and then just have a free playground play with for cabinet installation on these corner pieces for the most part they can go in really well you just really need to just conceal or have a minimum enough of a gap that'll conceal with your baseboard depending if you go a 3/4 Trim or/ in so once you get this in and slide it in place and let's say this doesn't snap in just grab yourself one of these flooring installing tools which with this kind of floor you honestly don't use it that much then you put it in here give it a couple of bangs with a little Mallet should be back in business it's blown pretty quick so far speaking of no transitions this is our first section of no transition a lot of Times by The Doors you have to get like a trim piece to cover this stuff but with these pet doors what's cool about them is they actually have a natural Gap underneath so what we'll need to do is this piece I cut it too short so what we'll need to do is get it a little bit longer and it'll go right underneath an exact width and it be looking absolutely freaking Flawless that's one transition and then we got a bunch of other transition to go coming across our next transition here we're wrapping around through the hallways this is important here cuz when you're coming through here you got your door jams already in place the best way to get the best results in terms of having everything concealed is this door jam you got to notch it on the side on below it and what you can do is take a scrap piece of your flooring lay it down use an oscillating tool give it a nice perfect cut that way this piece slides over and we'll be able to continue this transition and then we'll have a little flip transition towards the tile and remember I said the only transitions we're going to have is for the bathrooms we're keeping our work for [Music] the number one selling point behind this flooring is the fact that it's waterproof and most flooring is water resistant and like scratch resistance so it has like a tolerance to it and I've done a video about a year and a half ago maybe I'll link it right here of me testing the most expensive versus the most cheapest flooring and I did a flood test for like 48 hours to see what made the seams come apart and the reason I went with waterproof flooring is as you can see we're getting a lot of snow out here this is all packed up so what I was afraid of that this would actually penetrate through the flashing and start seeping in that's first order of fear second order of fear is when you're coming in through this entrance you you have a bunch of snow here that could possibly seep underneath or people come in in here and as you can see we have some puddles with this stuff is the reason why uh it's as tough as it is the way it's kind of fabricated is if you see here we have basically a plastic a corkboard for you know your dampening and uh no reason for moisture barrier and then on top of that is we have just a very fine veneer now this stuff I've tried to scratch it many of times and did have any luck I mean we could this is my key I mean you can see if we can try to get that light in here I mean you could barely see anything here that's really impressive that's good veneer and I know good veneer when I see it but also because there's not a lot of MDF or wood particles inside this thing when these seams come together they're also not wood and so now you got basically a gasket that's working in your floors this is by far one of my most favorite floors I've ever worked with especially for the price point all right we got really tight fits around the wall which is great because we don't have to use 3/4 in uh base boards we can if we wanted to but you can get away with/ in which means we'll save a little bit of money on materials now one thing I did learn from my flooring guys is there's a little bit easier way to install this stuff and we're using minimal tools we're actually only only using it on ends or tight to reach spots like that with a little pry bar but with this stuff if you lay this long piece I'll call it the tongue out in front of you not inside on the other side and then you take your short end and you place it in it locks a lot easier now whenever you have a hard time most of the time it's because you're approaching it this way and there's not enough leverage second piece of advice I was given by my flooring guy is use your foot for that leverage so when you have this connecting piece get it nice and tight make sure this piece is lined up as closely to the veneer as possible don't have it sticking out you know an eighth of an inch uh or more as long as you get it nice and tight you get your foot in there press that in this is a lot harder when there's not a lot of pieces oh there it is and then just snap it in place literally no tools really like this product here's the annoying parts and the Annoying Parts always come about is whenever a piece has to go overlap into the other section we try to do a little U around it and it just doesn't work especially on a section like this that we e both so what we kind of came up with is if we pop it in and then take the piece that we already stencl out before cutting it getting it here well that's a little too far but you get the idea once we get it in there we can glue it down and Brad nail it down to the subfloor that way it looks like a continuous piece and this is a nice crisp line because we cut it with the template and then we can continue without any transitions going into the laundry room the furnace room the closet and the mudro up this is where using your scrap pieces that you cut off as your starters save them cuz when it comes to small spaces like this they're a great filler without having to get a hole in new Plank and waste material all right solid day two flooring we got the entire living room dining room kitchen all done up we're in the hallways we're doing the closets uh we are almost ready to get in the other rooms and also you're like hey who's the other guy on camera well this is Ben say hi to Ben hi so Ben has been working with me off the channel on so many projects over the course of like a couple of years now and we just got a perfect opportunity for him to come on board and be part of the Mr builda channel here and it's awesome because he knows what he's doing and it's going to help me bust out these projects a whole lot quicker that means more videos so make sure you give Ben some love in the comments be nice to him and uh in the meantime we are going to come back tomorrow and start wrapping ourselves into finishing off the rest of that hallway for our way into the primary bedroom's closet we're almost done in here we got our uh basement or crawl space access we got to get the lid up there but one thing I wanted to mention to you guys downstairs Down Below in the crawl space we have a moisture barrier it's just mostly there to keep moisture from the raw ground seeping up building up underneath possibly creating mold uh and at the same time it acts as a weed barrier now there's also something else that comes out of there that I only recently got on to and to be honest with it's freaking me out all right so full disclosure I had no idea about this my mother-in-law about a year ago told me that I should get a radon kit for my house and I had no idea what it is so after doing some research I found out terrifying that radon is a gas that's a byproduct of uranium being broken down through rocks and soil you know when they build your house excavation all that stuff and get this it's colorless it's odorless it's tasteless and the terrifying part about it that it's radioactive great it can seep into your house with the cracks in your foundation if not properly ventilated and by the way did you know that in your craw space you have your foundation walls and then down the middle is just piece of millimeter some plastic that's just a vapor barrier that being said I could not be more excited to partner with the sponsors of today's video ainet now there's a map where you live to show you the levels of radon in the soil and you could judge based off what those levels are now we live in Idaho and based off of the map we're zone two that means we're between two and four pickle curies now I wanted to make sure the airnet radon plus sensor is the one to go with because there's so many online so I hopped in on Amazon and I bought two of the most populars out there right out of the gates the air things did not show me a reading it actually took up to I believe an hour to get a reading number two there's no Wi-Fi connection to this and it only shows me the long-term average and the current day average though the EC cube is nice and Slick there's no way for me to come up and see the reading of apart from getting into my app so if you're not a scientist like me this really simplifies it it's a simple green yellow and red this allows me to have more of a peace of mind to know which part of my house or maybe it's the workspace that I work in right now are the most Troublesome now after getting slightly high readings at the cabin I went ahead and installed a radon gas remediation system at the cabin where in the cross space I have a pipe and a fan that sucks the radon gas up and vents it out of the building so that it doesn't start seeping through the subf flooring radioactive gases are responsible for over 21,000 lung cancer deaths in the United States so please be sure to check out the rate on gas levels in your home and to make it a little bit easier for you to get a sensor for your home AR is providing a special discount code the viewers of this channel when you click the link in description use my code build it 10 you'll receive 10% off your airnet radon plus sensor all right this is the primary bedroom we just got a strip to finish here we already made our run into this closet here where we have adct to the basement or the crawl space we got to get our OSB on so we can get the flooring onto it but everything's installing nice and smoothly in case I forget to mention the product is called cortech Pro uh and the color is Cairo Oak so it has those natural wood tones that are pretty Universal they're large planks and being scratchers this and waterproof and all the other stuff that we already mentioned uh price point is fantastic if you were to find into Home Depot or any other store most of the easy access stores like that the big box stores they're usually like the premium stuff is like five or six bucks a square foot this stuff is actually pretty reasonable considering the cheapest is about two bucks a sare foot uh this Cairo Oak and prote is $4.9 so if you want to do your own calculations of what it would cost to do your own home $4.9 a square foot multiply by how many squ ft you have good practice to have is maybe add 10 to 15% extra for you know Screw ups and all that stuff I think you'll be sitting pretty all right we're going to finish this last drip off and that means we can start heading up and working on the second floor all right everything's going smoothly we're making our way to the second floor now remember we're going to have a spiral staircase here and a railing so the flooring is still going to match it going vertically this way along with the rest of the cabin but here's the thing we got to cap it off right over here to conceal this drywall and make the transition if you will to the Upper Floor so they sell these little transition pieces the they're cool but the weird thing about it is you only have about 3/8 of an inch for a lip so what we're going to do here is we scribed our line for that 38 of an inch and we're going to take our flooring we're going to butt it up to exactly where that line is and then with the magic of this end cap we're going to slide it in place and what it'll do is it'll sit just at that 3/8 so we'll have a nice tight fit here and because there's a little bit of a a bow which I don't know where it's coming from to be honest with you well it's tiny you just got to bring it in we'll put Liquid Nails secure that straight down and then we'll put some tape over it to make sure it drives comfortably overnight and then this should be pretty dang Flawless we got everything lined up we did a dry fed here's one thing I discovered last minute uh these have an exposed endone on them and when I asked my flooring guy uh awesome Leo from NAA floors he said what flooring guys typically do is to create a 45 and then put that 45 on there to cap it off uh unfortunately this is an 8T stick uh and this is a few inches over actually it's 1 in over 8 ft so I would have to buy a completely separate stick and by that time I won't be able to have enough material to make that 45 so I put the old nog into work and I kind of came up with a system where I took a scrap piece of flooring and I Creed these endc caps and I think they fit so nicely I'm really excited how that turned out but everything's all done up we're going to throw some liquid nail down throw this piece on and then we're going to tape it down so the sucker doesn't move before it has a chance to dry okay transition's on it's going to be drying overnight tomorrow should be solid we have maybe another 120 square ft left in here this sucker will be done and that means we'll be ready for trim and baseboards and all that cool stuff let's wrap this up and I'll show you guys when everything's clean up there's big reveal how next it looks stay tuned [Music] well guys I could not be happier how everything turned out here the floors look absolutely perfect the transitions are flawless the product is incredible I've used it before like I said it waterproof we're already bringing a bunch of snow in here I have that peace of mind knowing that this thing is going to last a very long time and at the same time didn't break the budget all in all almost 2,000 ft banged it out in about a week $5,000 was total spent on the materials and boy boy it looks great but but I got to get back to working I'm building an entire bathroom shower the whole kitten Kaboodle saving myself a whole lot of money make sure you subscribe check out next week's video and in the meantime here's a video think you might enjoy see you bye