I love details and precision in design. When laying the CORETEC flooring in our house, one thing I really wanted to avoid was a threshold between the kitchen tile and the vinyl planks. Thresholds look bad, are typically used to hide flaws, and are easy to trip over in the dark. I was determined not to have a threshold anywhere, even when the tile met the carpet.
This is bad:
This looks much better:
Our project started first with our bathroom, laying CORETEC vinyl planks on top of the linoleum went well. You can read all about it here. I got a comment about how I made the transition from carpet to the bathroom. I hate seeing those metal clamps at these transitions and wanted to just have the carpet end and tile begin at the doorway of the bathroom. The way to do this is with a little thing called a carpet Z-bar. You can get them pretty cheap at any bigbox store They cost less than $2 for a 4-foot section. You can cut them with a regular little red hacksaw and then nail them right into the subfloor. It’s basically a little metal piece about an inch wide that is pressed into the shape of a Z. What you do is take the carpet and wrap the loose end over the top of the Z and tuck it under the top lip of the Z, then hammer it to the subfloor. Then go back with the hammer and crimp all along the z bar so the carpet will be squished into place for a tight hold. This prevents it from slipping out over time.
The first step it to remove the previous threshold and carpet clamping thing. This is the thing I want to avoid using when I finish laying the floor and it MUST go. Using a flathead screwdriver and tiny hammer, you first pry back the metal to reveal the end of the carpet, then pull the carpet and any padding back until you can get to the nails below.
Once this piece is removed, you can install the Z-bar. I used much smaller nails that the illustration and image shows here. The goal is to have the nail disappear completely. I put a nail at each end of the Z bar, then I hammered the Z-bar flat. In places where the carpet wouldn’t lay flat enough, I added a nail there (a couple of places in the middle of the threshold area). When done, it looks like a manicured golf course. Roughage that has a clean and clear transition to the green.