Installing New Flooring

You ready to get floored by the next step in the process here? I know I am, because next step is putting down flooring, which means it's really, really, really close to the camper being done. One thing I'm gonna say about eleventy billion times in the upcoming sequence here is, read the directions for your product. I got from a home center some vinyl flooring and it's a little bit different manufacturer by manufacturer how you cut it, how you handle it, how you store it, there's a lotta stuff going on there. So read the directions for your product.

What I'm really gonna go after here is what I'm doing to lay it out and then how I'm gonna get it into the camper. So, the layout aspect. With this particular product, they would like the end pieces to not be less than eight inches long and the side pieces to not be less than two inches wide. So here's what that means is that, if I take this full piece and I just start on one wall and then I do another piece and another piece and another piece, how big is that final piece over here gonna be when I get to this side? So with a camper, as opposed to like a huge living room or dining room in your house, we gotta do the best we can here.

There's lots of little components that jut out. There are a lotta narrow spaces. So here's what I'm gonna go after. I'm treating the front of the camper here as the main living space, the most obvious visual area. So what I want is for the flooring to be centered here.

And what I mean by that is, if up against this wall, there's a narrow three-inch strip that I start with, I wanna end up a three-inch strip on that side over there so that the pattern is consistent. Now that may or may not maintain through the hallway and into the back bedroom, but I don't care as much about that because I'm primarily concerned about this. Similarly, end-to-end, what I did is I checked to see when I put one piece down and it's up against a wall here, which is the bathroom wall, and then I come with another piece, where is that ending me? And as it turns out, the way it's working is that that piece down, this piece goes, I'm gonna end up cutting about six inches off the end of this and that's perfect so that I end up against the wainscoting over here. So to do the math, here's what you need to do.

You gotta grab your product and what you wanna know on your flooring is the width, and I don't mean the width from outside to outside. It's what we would call the coverage, which means from the finished face edge there to the finished face edge there. On this one, when I measure that, hook there, measure to there, it's 7 1/8 inches. Then, the next thing I did is, on the camper, I measured the width of this area. So it's from the threshold to the door on this side up against the front of the cabinet on this side.

That number is 68 1/2 inches. So then, that is not math I can do in my head. So I grabbed a calculator. 68.5 overall width divided, whoops, that's minus, divided by 7.125, that's 7 1/8, and my answer is 9.6. So that means it's gonna take 9.6 pieces to go all the way across.

What does that tell me? To make it easy, let's say it's 9 1/2 pieces. So if I just started there, then it would be a piece and a piece and a piece and a piece and a piece nine times, and then I would have to cut one in two. I'd have 1/2 a piece at the end. So if I do it that way, it's not horrible, but it's not centered.

So what I wanna do is cut a narrow piece on that side, then put a full piece, full piece, full piece, full piece, and then I'll end up with a narrow piece on this side. That's what keeps me centered. So, it's gonna end up being, I'm gonna end up starting with 1/4 of a piece over there. I'm gonna end with 1/4 of a piece over here, 1/2 of a 1/2, and that's gonna give me a centered pattern down the middle. So what I'm gonna do now is start cutting some parts, getting them ready.

With this flooring, it has to lay down and then it clicks together. So it makes the most sense to start on one side, get one piece in, click, get another piece in, click, and work your way across. So, I'll get some parts cut and then can start looking at the installation process working across and down. Consistently, uniformly? As we go.

As the floor goes in, one of the things you might find is that you've got trim in place, like this piece I've got here in the corner, that's too low, it's down too close to the floor for the flooring to be able to slip under it. And I did that on purpose. When I put the trim in, the easiest way to do that was to just let it run down to the floor, anticipating that, when we get to this step, we have to do a little bit of trim on the trim. Gotta provide some clearance there. This is a piece of scrap, so whether I do it good face up or good face down for the next step doesn't matter.

If you're doing what I'm about to do with a piece of good flooring, you wanna make sure you do it good face down. And the it is, remember our multi-tool. I'm gonna let that just run on the top of the floor, and I'm gonna cut straight into that trim. And that gives me the thickness of the flooring plus the kerf, the thickness of the saw blade, as clearance above the floor, and that's absolutely perfect. So as you're working through any place in the camper where you've got this kind of a thing, you have to do this kind of a trim.

And once I get that outta there, absolutely perfect. It's a good thing to know in your house too if you put new flooring in your house, same deal. If it's thicker than your old floor, that's a great trick for that. So now, this guy is cut. And one of the things I'm paying attention to is making sure there's no schmutz, there's no junk underneath the new flooring.

I took the time before I got too far along here to run a shop vacuum over the entire floor and get it all cleaned up. But as I go, just in case, like particulates fall off of this or off of me, I'm making sure that the floor is clean so that there's nothing that ends up under it. So on that end, it's kind of a tongue and groove sort of a thing. You need to pay a lot of attention to, for your brand of flooring, there we go, what kinda spacing they want you to maintain. When this is done, when the floor is in, it floats.

It can't be fastened down. So there has to be spacing on the ends, spacing on the side, and did I mention read the instructions? That's where that information is gonna be, so check the instructions and make sure that you're doing that part right for your brand of flooring. With the camper, part of the challenge is, there's so many cuts to make. If we were doing a house, this thing would be done by now.

The house would be done by now. 'Cause the flooring goes together really quickly, but when you gotta cut around all the stuff, it goes pretty slowly. Take time, be careful, do it right. Speaking of cutting around, I've got this hole in the floor where the vent goes. So the way I did that, I'm a big fan of marking rather than measuring.

I brought a piece of flooring over here, laid it where it would be, and then I marked its edges, measured how much had to be cut back in this direction to get over the hole, cut that piece, laid it down. Then when I came along with the next piece, same thing, marked the edges of the vent hole, marked the opening in this direction. Now, before you go any further, grab a vent and make sure it does that. Right now, it would be really easy to unclick these pieces to remove 'em and trim 'em a little bit if you needed to. If you get a few rows over, that's gonna get really, really, really hard to do.

What's cool now is, with the pieces that are down, we can go faster. Now one of the things that's funky about the way I started is that the flooring has got on the end this lip on it. And in the perfect world, that piece is getting installed, this piece is getting laid into that lip, and then laid down like that, and then coming over to engage with the previous row. But because of the way I started, I can't do that. It's not a deal breaker.

We're still gonna be able to get this to work like this. So, one of the things we wanna have happen is, there's a seam back by the vent. There's a seam there. You never wanna have your seams aligned row to row. So this row started with a full length piece.

The row I'm on now starts with a 1/2 length piece. As a result, when the full goes down, it overlays the seam. It bridges the seam. Now, this whole deal of what I was talking about with the ends, this is still gonna work out just fine. I'm gonna get the end where it needs to be, then come and work on the edge.

And in the perfect world, one would have maybe a helper. 'Cause having another pair of hands so that you can make sure you're engaged all the way down the four-foot length of this stuff is helpful. But you can tell visually. When you look at the seam, it goes from open to grainless when you have it right. Now I opened up my end a little bit, there we go.

See what I go through to try to show you stuff? I had this perfectly positioned, but then I wanted to give you an example, there we go. We're really seamless right there. And then when you lay it down, if it feels like there's some resistance as it goes down, you're probably not fully engaged here. And that's causing it to tip a little bit funny.

Now with the space on the edges and the ends, don't sweat that. It's not a cosmetic issue. When you're done, you put down some kinda base shoe to cover all of that. When the base shoe goes in, it's really important that it fastens to the wall, not the floor. The floor has to be allowed to float continuously throughout its life.

So, we're a long ways away from shoe, 'cause I have a lot more flooring to go down. But like I said, what's fun now is, with all this cutting done over here, 1/2 length piece, full length piece, full length piece. That's bridging this seam right there. If you've ever shingled a roof, it's a very similar concept. Now, I can go this way.

All right, I'll get an end started. Little bit of tipping. So nice when that closes. There. Rinse and repeat.

So one of the things that's worth doing, as you work around, I'm going back and looking at the seams that I did previously. So there was one over here that had opened up just a little bit, probably from me messing around over here and manipulating that piece. So you wanna get that clicked closed before you continue. If you needed to, it's so easy right now to pop these flooring pieces back out, fix a seam, continue. Once the floor's all the way to the end, it just gets progressively more difficult.

Now, rinse and repeat, like I keep saying. Seam there, so we want a full sized piece. And then that's gonna be a 1/2 length piece that comes in there, and I'll just keep patching in the floor going in that direction and in that direction. After all sorts of scurrying in and outta the camper, cutting flooring pieces to size, coming in, laying it down, spending a lotta time on your knees, the floor is gonna be done. It's not done, done, 'cause we still have to trim it out.

So one of the things to remember is, typically, these floors have to have room to expand and contract. Read the directions that come with your flooring. Once you've got it laid, then the next step is to get a shoe in here. And remember, we're generally short of the edges, and that shoe is gonna accommodate that so that you can't see the gap. When you nail this, nail it horizontally to the wall, not vertically to the floor.

Otherwise, you're countermanding that whole expansion thing. So, nails are going this way. You can get shoe at a home center and it's just, oddly enough, called base shoe. And that's a really good way to trim this out. And with that, your floor is done and we're one step closer to camping.