 So, if you want to put down new flooring, new laminate click tiles, of course, first thing you're going to have to do is get rid of your old stuff. Now, unfortunately, if you live in a bit older of a house or the flooring is just more of the old style, chances are it's glued to the floor. It's going to be a pain in the butt. Most of the difficulty in this project is going to be removing the old flooring. I recommend using something like this. Putty knife, some people call them spatulas, a few names for this tool, just a simple, flat piece of metal with a handle. The official name for this tool is a joint knife. That is the official name, joint knife. Crowbars work well too. You just got to be careful you don't damage the sub flooring. That's the flooring underneath your wood flooring. They even make special tools that pop this stuff up. You just have to be careful and really make sure it can get underneath. The problem you're going to run into with some tools is they may not be flat enough, long enough to really get underneath and pry it up. It's definitely a workout once you start doing a few of these because if they're glued they're going to be a pain in the get up. And a lot of times they're going to leave a glue residue behind, which means you're going to have to clean your floors. But first things first, tile by tile, piece by piece, we need to rip up the old flooring. Make sure you remove all the nails that we're holding in your molding, your edging floor board. Usually found on things near stairs or other design features in your house like the dividers between rooms. You're going to need some lock jaw pliers to get them out. And a bit of strength. Alright, one out. This is making it a lot easier when you're laying down the new, laminate flooring. Eventually you're going to get to a point where you've removed all of your old flooring. Congratulations. It's a pain in the butt, especially if it was glued down. But it's worth it because we've got rid of the old stuff and we can put it in the nice new stuff. Just a word for the wise, if you're left with sticky residue or a lot of dirt, clean it up. You want your subfloor to be as nice and even as possible. If there's holes in it or if it was a concrete subfloor, you're going to need to patch it up. If it's wood, just make sure it's pretty even and clean. Then you're going to want to determine how much new laminate you'll need. So you'll have to determine the square footage required. That's how you buy a laminate flooring or even hardwood flooring or tiles. It comes in a square foot measurement, every box has a certain amount of square feet. So this is just pretty simple math. It goes back to your day's a basic geometry. For every room you're going to put new flooring in, you're going to need a width and a length. The floor I'm doing has kind of different sections. So I have like a main floor, a hallway to the door, a small bathroom, a kitchen, but it's just the same technique for all of them. Get your width, feet and inches, and your length, feet and inches. Then eventually you're going to get totals and square feet. And then from there they recommend adding in 10% extra. We're all human, so we all make mistakes. So you're going to need an extra 10%. You know, if you cut incorrectly or you chip a piece or your measurements are slightly off, you're going to need that 10% extra. So eventually you're going to come down to a final number. In my case, 362 square feet, a decent amount, but it's not the biggest place. You may have a lot more or you may have a lot less. Either way, you're going to need to know this number when you buy your new flooring. So you go to the store, you look at the laminate that they sell and you see what kind of style you like. You know, do you want a more modern look? You want an old fashioned look? Do you want it to be a wide type plank? What kind of grain do you want it to have? Hopefully if you're redoing your floor, you already know what you'd like. Otherwise, take some time and figure it out. But with the square footage of our project we figured out, you can look on the boxes and they'll tell you they'll have displays in the store too. But it will tell you the square feet that comes in each box, the square footage of each box. This design is 17.59 square feet per box. So I know I need a 362. So I simply divided that out, divided it by 17.59 and I determined that I would need roughly 21 boxes to complete the job. Always round up. You know, if 20 boxes only put me at 340, and if I made too many mistakes, I might have to go buy more. So 21 boxes put me a little over 360. They recommend, too, when you buy your boxes, bring them home and let them sit. So I kind of took the plastic, ripped it up a little bit just so the air could get through. Let them sit for two days they recommend, 48 hours. If you don't have time for that, that's okay. In my case, mine have only been sitting for about six hours, but just let them get used to the temperature and the humidity of the room you're in. You're going to need some basic tooling as well. What's nice is a lot of stores sell a wood flooring installation kit. It may be called something different, but it's basically just the same materials that come in it. The same tools. You have a pull bar, and what's nice about this is, as you're laying down your laminate flooring, you're going to need to kind of pull it together, push it together. It's pretty much just adult giant lagoes. They have channels that lock together, which require some force. And there's going to be times where you can't get your hand back the push on it a certain way. So you can put this pull bar on one side, and then using a mallet, you can hit it, hit the other end, and it will help pull your pieces together, connect them together. So you're going to need a mallet, of course. You don't want a hammer, though. Just in case you accidentally hit your tile or something. A typical metal hammer is just too risky. Use a nice rubber mallet. Still got weight behind it, but it's not as dangerous. What also comes in a lot of these kits are floor spacers. They're usually tapered too, and taper just means it comes to a point. So you have a variety of options. You can use them on one part at the top where they're thicker, or you can use them more towards the bottom where they're thinner. A lot of it just depends on the height of your laminate that's going to be up against it too. These go up against the wall and touch your laminate. Okay, so why do we want to leave a gap between our walls and our laminate flooring? Well, with the type of flooring I'm doing, the laminate flooring, it's not glued. So it's called floating because nothing's holding it in place. There's no screws, there's no nails, there's no glue. So as people walk on it and put your weight on it, even if you're not a happy person, just over time it's going to spread it out. That floor is slowly going to stretch out, and it's going to cover up that gap. So you might think that's a little odd with the gap in there, but you don't even see it because most houses have a molding, a piece that goes above it. So you don't even notice the gap in the beginning either. The last piece you get in a lot of kits too, it's not as advanced as the pull bar. It's just a bar that kind of rests on your laminate, and again, let's you hit it with your mallet without actually hitting directly on the tile. So you can put this on the edge of your tile and just hit this, this absorbs the blow. Transfer's the force, but it doesn't take the impact directly. So your click tile stays safe for that way. Okay, so at this point you may think, great, let's just start putting our flooring down. We know how much we need, and we know where to put it, right? Okay, not entirely. There is a style thing that comes into play here. So you need to determine the number of pieces for the width of the room you're in. Now to do that, you take your room width, which you figured out earlier to get your square feet, then you subtract the gaps on both sides of the room, because we're just talking about the width, not the length. There's going to be two gaps. Remember the spacers I showed earlier? Those are gaps. That dimension is taken out of your room width. I'm doing about three eighths, roughly half an inch for each one. But then you, so you subtract that out, and you get a new room width. That includes the gaps, or it doesn't include the gaps. So it's a smaller width. Then you need to divide that by the actual size of your laminate piece, the width of that, which you may not know to you by, I didn't know till I bought it. That will give you the number of pieces wide that you need for your room. Okay, but the problem you may run into here, and this doesn't apply to everyone. This isn't true in my case. You may need to even out the ends. You may have a situation. Here's just a basic example where you have normal tile, normal tile, normal tile, you know, normal tile. These are all normal pieces of laminate. But then guess what? Against your other wall, it's just a thin sliver. So you have to cut really thin pieces of laminate. That is just pretty much an ugly style. You're not going to want to see that in your room. So the solution to that, it's a nice workaround. You take the width of that skinny piece, and you just add it to the regular width of a normal piece. And then you divide that by two. So it's still going to be smaller than a regular piece, but you're kind of absorbing that little piece into the other end. And you do it on the opposite end. That's where you lay it. So what your new floor would look like, you would have a slightly smaller than usual piece on this end. And then on your other end, you would have a slightly smaller than usual, too. But these two match, and they're much closer to the regular three in between. Or you know, this is three in my example, but it might be ten or twenty for your floor. So instead of having all regulars in one skinny, you've kind of let that skinny take some of the width of a regular one. So you've got two kind of medium ones on the end. This looks better. It blends in better. If you do the math, and your skinny one really is close to the same size, like a normal one, it's only an inch or so off. You may not have to do this. I'm not doing it, but you might need to. So keep that in mind. Okay. So there's a few things you need to consider about your laminated flooring. Just in general, most pieces come in around six to eight inches wide. And when measuring the width, it's good. Don't measure this slot all the way to this edge, because this slot is going to go underneath a trailing edge. So really just measure the patterned laminate, you see, the actual wood grain-looking style. Otherwise, too, what's nice, some of your top brands, they come with these little plastic holders and the slots. That's just so during transportation, they don't get closed off accidentally. I mean, imagine if your box of laminets couldn't even go together, because all the channels were crushed. So that's nice, too. Now this brand, and some of your more expensive brands, they're nicer ones with lifetime warranties, things like that, will come with padding on the bottom. This is called an underlay. It just gives you cushion. It seems weird to think you would need cushion underneath a floor. It's nice. You can actually feel it. Even though you're walking on a hardwood floor, you can kind of feel the gif of it. Now I believe, yes, this has a built-in as well. So this has an underlay built-in. It's just attached. Comes like that. If you don't have one, you're going to need the buy separate. They sell them in giant rolls. You just lay down. Make sure you put underlay everywhere. There's also something else to consider. Called a vapor mat. It's like a moisture barrier, moisture lining. This is to prevent water, you know, and just moisture from seeping into your laminet. You're flooring, which would not be good. It's going to warp it. It's going to damage it. That's part of the reason you set out your flooring for a few days, just to let it acclimate, get used to the temperature of your room. You don't always need a vapor mat, though. You need it when your floor is below grade. Okay, so what does below grade mean? That would mean if you open your front door, you're stepping up. We're above grade here. We step down to leave this place. If you have a house where your floor is below the outdoor level, it's called a below grade. You're going to need it then. So if you were to step up to leave your house, you're below grade. Not good designed anyway. Or if you're putting flooring down where there's a lot of water anyway. Washing machine, bathroom, where you think there might be a lot of moisture or it might be leaking a shower room. If you're not doing tile, if you're doing hardwood flooring or laminet in a bathroom with a shower, put a vapor mat down. For my project, I don't need one. I've also worked with concrete or like embalacements. It's a good idea as well. So if you're above grade, not a moisture rich environment, you don't need a vapor mat. Otherwise, put one down. Or just in case you want one. Put it down. So before you begin to assemble your laminet pieces, take out these protection pieces, these spacer pieces. That's going to free up your channel. Only your one side's going to have them. Your long channel doesn't have it. The other end, the other side doesn't have one. Then your long channels don't have them either. But take out the ones that you do see. You're going to need a tool, a machine, to cut your laminet pieces. Do not do it by hand unless you have a specialty tool for it. They do have a specialty saw for it. I would still even recommend against that. A few years back, I did it just a single room, single bathroom with a hand saw. It was horrible. It's hard to cut straight. It adds a lot of time to your project. So either rent or just buy your own saw. A saw that I like a lot for it, a lot of people recommend is a miter saw, which you can see here. They're also known as chop saws, just because they do a chopping motion. What's nice is most of them have guards too that only raise up as you lower it. So be very careful. I'm wearing safety glasses. In case anything flies out, do not put your hand anywhere in that path. And just make sure you hold your wood steady. I'll hold your laminet steady where you need to cut it. Bring it down, cut it, raise it up, and let go of the button. Quick and simple, that's it. A lot of them have adjustable bottoms too. You can adjust the angle of your cut, which is very useful if you have to do angle cuts or go around corners. I am going to cut a small sliver off of my first piece, just because it has this edge that hangs off this channel, which you normally need to connect. But where I'm starting in a corner, I want this to be flat so that it gets right up against the spacer. So here's the corner I'm starting in. If I didn't cut that channel off, it would be the channel budding up against the wall eventually, budding up against the spacers as you lay it. And that would look awkward. Even when you get molding on here, there's a good chance you would still see part of the channel. So I'm cutting the get a flat edge to bud up right against this. And when laying your laminet, they say go lengthwise. So the direction of your laminet, it should be parallel to the longest direction of your room. So for this room, it goes that way. You know, into the kitchen, it shoots that way. So we want our planks to be going this way as well, parallel. And it's good to start one corner and work your way back. So I'm going to be starting in this corner. So I'm going to cut this piece now. And I want a tiny sliver cut off because I don't want to waste a lot of it. But just for the safety of my hand too, to make sure it's out of the way, I'm going to get myself a little bit of grip room. But I know it's at zero degrees, which means it's a perfectly perpendicular cut. And then if you do kind of a test without an actually moving, you'll see that it comes to, I'll get myself a little bit more room even. You'll see that it comes down perfectly perpendicular. Nice and straight. So just go nice and slow with your cut. Okay, I still have to cut a little of the way through, but you can see it's a nice clean cut. If you had to do that with a hand slot, take forever. So let's finish that cut out. So now for your first piece, get your spacers, set them against your wall. And then you're going to just push it up, flat edge against flat edge. You're going to need these channels. To make sure a channel is open on both sides, the sides that you're going to be using. So my spacers kind of fit together to make a quarter inch spacer. Just put one in there, I'm going to put it like in the middle. And then I can push that against there. And I know that that leaves me a gap in my wall of a quarter inch. Then put one against your other wall as well. This one maybe just to just to get a feel for the gap in there. Here we go. So that's a quarter inch spacing in there now. Now it's nice is when you have these larger spaces you're doing, you don't have to worry about cutting every piece. So now we can just connect them, use our pull bar and hammer them together. So the next piece I'm not even going to cut, I'm just going to connect it in and make sure it snaps into place. So now this piece just kind of locks into place. And you kind of have to go at an angle to get it in there. There we go. So feel it slide into place properly and make sure you line it up good with the edge. But you really want to make sure the back sides of them stay nice and straight. Now we need to close this gap. It may not look like it's very open, but it is. So we're going to use our pull bar. Actually, we don't even need the pull bar. We just need the buffer piece and we're going to hammer these two together. We're going to hammer that way because the wall is holding it back. So it's going to help these two pieces come together. So get your open to the tile, put your protector plastic piece there and then we're going to slowly hammer and you'll watch your crack close up. The divider between the two tiles will slowly close up. So I put in my third piece making sure the use spacers that keep them all the same distance from this wall. Now we're to the last piece of this row. A full plank, a full piece is not going to fit there. So we need to measure that gap out and leave room for some spacing. In this case though, there's not going to be any molding there because that's part of a counter. So I'm only going to leave a very tiny gap right there, not even my normal gap. So measure it out and then cut that piece to length and put it there. And then we're going to take our leftover piece and start the new row with it. I have no open end to hammer in this scenario but I can put that pull bar in there. Lightly hammer it, make sure it stays down and watch it bring my pieces together. I don't think this 11 inch piece is going to look too bad. Might look a little short but really it's not that bad. So now you can angle it up. This is just kind of the angle of putting laminate flooring it. You get used to it. You come in at like a 30 to 40 degree angle and you kind of push it down. But there's going to be a gap in here as well. Just like there was the other direction. So guess what? Time to get our buffer piece and our mallet and hammer them together. So now just lightly tap it and you'll watch the crack disappear and it gives it a wholeness look to it which is really nice. What I like a lot about laminate flooring is that as you go and hammer more and more pieces together it really helps even things up. Like right now this kind of wobbles a little bit and it looks a little open even when you hammer these two together. That's because these are two separate pieces and you see the gap in the channel here. Once we put our next piece on in this next row it's going to hold all three of them together. Nice and firm and you won't see the line half as well. It's so to look really nice. You get used to it. It's kind of like an awkward dance you're doing with it all at first. But as you go just keep hammering. Just make sure your spacer's stay in the place, keep everything together. Alright let's keep it going. Eventually you're going to get to a point where you have to get behind things underneath things. In my case I have this oven I need to move but then you're also going to run into these kind of awkward geometry situations. Because if you look right here it gets narrower underneath the beginning of this counter. But not only that it opens up again where the oven is at. So I could do one whole piece right here and just do a cut out for this but unfortunately I just don't think my tooling is that good. So what I'm going to do is just cut one small piece that covers this and then goes all the way here up into the edge where the oven starts. Now what's awkward about that is because I'm cutting that piece smaller it's not going to have a connector piece right here that connects to the tile next to it. But when I come through with the next row later it will be held into place pretty snug. So it's not going to be perfect but it'll be good enough. Otherwise if you want to do a cut out make it one whole continuous piece you're going to have to be careful what how you do that. Because on a chop saw you can really only cut this direction. I can't cut out this way just because it's just not possible to do that cut on a chop saw. And that's the limitations of my chop saw. So you see I have this gap in here that's ground I still need the cover. I'm probably going to have to use a hand saw to finish that out. So it's going to be kind of awkward for a little while. Here is a great example as to why you need a machine saw, a chop saw. See how awkward these cuts I ended up with are? Well this one's because I used a chop saw twice so it wasn't lined up perfectly. But then this one's because of a hand saw which I had to use just to get this weird shape but otherwise you'd want to stay away from. So let's see how it lines up now. Okay, looks pretty good. Oh, not quite almost. Kind of get this because of this awkward dance you have to do. Honestly though I may be able to just wedge it in the place so let's see how that works. So I kind of have this gap right around here. There we go. Actually turned out pretty well. I'm pretty happy with it. I do kind of have an awkward opening right here against the counter but I'm just going to cut really thin strips later and fill them in. And you'll see that a lot. But luckily my piece now goes under the cap. So when we have our next row right here it's going to look really nice. I also move the oven. So I want to do this area behind the oven as well. So there may be a slight gap right here from where that awkward piece I cut was but again you can just cut really tiny pieces and fill the gap.