Project 4: Laying Laminate Floors (Part 4)

This is a continuation of a previous started project. Catch up by reading part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Last I left you, all the flooring was laid down, including around the door jams. Here is how to finish the floors (quarter rounds and transition pieces). 

Installing Quarter Rounds

A quarter round is a long thin piece of wood that is a quarter of a circle if you look straight down its length. They are used to cover the gap between the flooring and the wall. You have two choices when picking out quarter rounds: make them match the flooring or make them match the trim (normally white). If you pick trim then you can buy the quarter rounds at Lowe's or Home Depot. However, if you want to match the floor (like we did) you buy them whenever you buy the laminate. 

To install, you just remove the spacers and place your quarter round over the gap between the flooring and wall. I always started in a corner.

Here I am showing you that you have to cut the trim on a 45 degree angle so it fits into the corner. To do this you'll use a miter saw. I found it useful to always place the quarter round where I wanted it, and then marked it with a sharpie showing which way the angle needed to be cut. See, it's SO easy to cut it the opposite angle... no joke, I did that like a dozen times. Here is what it looks like cut at the correct angle:

Next you use a finishing nail gun (important note: different than a standard nail gun) connected to an air compressor to attach the quarter rounds to the wall. Notice, I said wall, not flooring. There should be zero nails in the flooring. That's why it's called a floating floor - it's not nailed down. The nails need to be long enough to go through the quarter round and into the baseboard of the wall. We used 1.5" finishing nails. Here's an example of how to angle the gun to hit the baseboard and not the flooring:

I cannot emphasis how gratifying this step is. It goes fairly fast and when the quarter rounds are on the floors start to really look good. Here's a picture of with and without the quarter rounds:

Now, you may have noticed the the end of the quarter round isn't dark brown like the laminate. This is fine when you are putting down quarter rounds back to back, but what about when you have to end them near a door? For this situation the best thing to do is cut them on an angle so the end slopes down towards the floor and then use a stain to make the end match your wood color. This is the stain I used:

(like my 'drop cloth'? Can you tell we just moved into a house and had a lot of extra pizza boxes laying around?) 
I just took a paper towel and stained the end of the quarter rounds like so:

When it's installed it looks so nice!

That's pretty much all there is to quarter rounds... but I'm going to share a little more. See, sometimes your floor isn't perfect. Sometimes you finish the whole room only to find out that the first row somehow shifted away from the wall and has created too big of a gap...

So what do you do? You run over to where you cut all your boards and find a long skinny piece to shove in the gap!

 

 

I hope that's helpful! It actually ended up happening in multiple rooms. 

Installing Transition Pieces

So, now all that's left are the transition pieces. These are the pieces that go in-between rooms. There are differently shaped pieces depending on if you're connecting laminate to laminate, laminate to carpet, laminate to tile, and the list goes on. However, the process for all of them is the same so I'll just show you how one is done.

Each of the transition pieces we used came with a metal track that looks like this:

It's U-shaped when you look down it lengthwise and it has a hole every so often.

The first step is to find out how long you need this metal track to be. So you measure your threshold. 

Next you are going to break the metal track to the size you need...yes, I said break. It has spots where the metal is thinner and can easily be broken over your knee. It doesn't have to be exactly the same length as your threshold, just close (follow Jeopardy rules - close as possible with out going over).

Put the metal track in the threshold and you're ready to attach it to the foundation.

Yes, I said attach it to the foundation. How do you do this? You have to use the right tools. Learn from my mistake... first I tried to use a concrete drill bit on my regular power drill. What was the result?

See that? That's what it looks like when your drill bit breaks off half way into your foundation. Needless to say it was NOT easy to get out. This happened twice in a row (there go those drill bits) before I called in the cavalry...aka my father in law. He informed me I was using the wrong drill, the wrong drill bits and had bought the wrong screws (gee thanks guy at Home Depot... helpful fail). 

Here are the drill bits and screws we went back and got (aka the correct ones):

My father in law also brought his hammer drill. Oh. My. Goodness.... I want one. That thing makes my power drill look like a little girl. Anyways, even with all the added power I literally was not strong enough to drill into the foundation. As much as I love this DIY stuff, sometimes it stinks to have puny girly muscles. Anyways, here's the hammer drill in use:

(You may have noticed the metal track is gone. We marked where the holes are and then removed it so it wouldn't get torn up by the drill).
After the holes were made he was able to use screws to attached the metal track to the foundation. (Again, I was too puny... boo).

Once the metal track is in the last step is to attache the actual transition piece. This is crazy easy. You just cut it to the length of your threshold, stick one end into the metal track on one side...

And then using the palm of your hand gently apply pressure from one side to the other, like you're squeezing a giant tube of tooth paste. 

It should be a tight fit. The metal track has a small lip that will bit into the transition piece helping to keep it in place. The nice thing is this piece can be removed if you ever need to (maybe redoing one of the rooms and not the other, maybe you are replacing a damaged plank, etc.).

Once it's in the room is DONE!!!!

Now our floors are done and they look great! I still LOVE them.

Project Cost: This is a hard one... because we bought things at different times, literally months apart. I'd estimate that total for the project was around $4,000. Not cheap. BUT I calculated how much money we would have had to pay to have it professionally installed... $4,000. So, by doing it ourselves we cut our expense in half. Totally worth it on a project this expensive. Plus we learned a lot!

Time: Another hard one to answer... 6 months? lol Well, if we had done it all at once and hadn't run in to having to re-order parts and busy seasons at work... I think we could have gotten it all done in a month worth of weekends. But we had a LOT of flooring to cover. After watching the process at our house, LJ's family put laminate in two of their rooms. It took them two days. SO much faster.

Difficulty: Hard. Not going to lie to you here. The basics aren't hard but when things go wrong... and they often did, it took some ingenuity to figure out a solution. I wouldn't attempt this if you've never touched a hammer before, but I would still say it's worth it if you have a little bit of DIY know how. Especially if you can find a friend who's done it before. It's a little scary to take on a project this big, but the good news is they don't have to be perfect. Seriously, after putting in these floors I've started noticing the flooring at other homes and businesses... no one's is perfect. Even the pros must run into problems sometimes. Overall, the only things wrong with our floors are the type of things only LJ and I will notice because we put them in. They look great and if I had to do it over, I wouldn't change a thing.