Adam@SheekGeek

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.

When we bought our open floor plan house, it already had tile in the kitchen and terrible pet-stained carpet in the living room. When we replaced the carpet with CORETEC plus “hardwood” I was determined not to have a threshold where the tile and hardwood met. Now CORETEC isn’t actually hardwood, it’s a engineered vinyl material made to look like hardwood. The core is made of some kind of foam I was told is derived from bamboo, and you can get an optional cork padding (about 1/16″ thick) as well. This was a good thickness for our needs as it is about as think as the tile in the kitchen.  The tile is the run of the mill 1/8″ thick “engineered” ceramic material. The tile had been laid on top of sheet vinyl flooring, and of course the mastic thickness made it a little higher still.

I can’t stand a bump in the middle of the room like you see in many homes where wood meets carpet or tile. I think that transition moulding is a sign of poor craftsmanship. In order to prevent this from happening when we laid the CORETEC, I had to first remove the carpet and all the tack strips. Something I learned is that when you pull out the tack strips, which were nailed to our concrete pad foundation, it leaves a crater.   In most cases these are around the edges by the wall and can be ignored, however the transition to the kitchen was more obvious.

To fix both problems (craters and height difference between CORETEC vinyl “hardwood” planks and the tile I used floor leveling compound.  For the entire area from the tile itself to about four or five feet back from the tile, I gradually feathered the thickness of the leveling compound so that the height difference between the middle of the hardwood floor and the edge by the tile was imperceptible.  When this dried, we laid the vapor barrier, then the vinyl floor tiles. Traditional wisdom says to begin laying flooring at an exterior wall. I made sure to measure the entire width of the room so I wouldn’t end up with a tiny sliver of CORETEC butting up against the tile.  In retrospect, I probably should have started laying the hardwood at the tile side instead of the wall in case there’s shifting or uneven walls.  In my case everything worked out great!

To fill the tiny gap between the tile and the vinyl planks, I wanted something that would look good and not prevent the floating CORETEC from having a little “breathing room”.  I went with a tinted and sanded silicone caulk.  Since we had recently painted our grout, color matching wasn’t hard at all.  This stuff is great because it stays flexible enough not to impede the floor, and makes a very nice transition to the tile. It was also very easy to use and clean up.

We’ve had this floor for three years now and it still makes me happy every time I look at this transition. The type of silicone grout we used does make it slightly tough to clean if it gets dirty (because silicone if grippy and the sand in it gives it texture) but it isn’t really a problem.

When we bought our current home, it was not in great shape. The previous owner had damaged a lot of things (many intentionally). One of the things on our minds had been the disgusting carpets. We couldn’t afford to do anything about them except hire a cleaner before we moved in, which didn’t help. We ended up removing the carpet from the master bedroom and sealed and painted the subfloor grey to make a nice industrial home office.

The rest of the house still hand gross carpet, full of dust and pet stains of the previous owners. Fixing this problem costed a lot, and took our whole summer.

 

We finally saved up enough to afford new flooring, but only if we did the installation ourselves. We shopped around all the local “liquidation” flooring companies and got some quotes. We even had some carpet replaced by them, but all the hardwood options were still too expensive. Jess found the material we liked the most (COREtec) for wholesale price online. Since we saved some money on the overall price, we got some extra to put in the bathrooms as well!

The stuff came in a semi truck, and I had to load like a pallet of these 50 lb boxes into the house. My first mistake was laying it in the middle of the carpet I needed to replace.   I ended up cutting all the carpet up around those boxes first, and finally moved them to the kitchen.

In the mean time I had to remove that patch of horribly scratched cherry hardwood that was in front of the front door (top left of the above pic). The area was only about 6×10 feet (60 sq feet), but it took me at least two full days to remove. They use what I like to call the Devil’s Peanutbutter to glue the wood to the concrete slab. After the first day, I had beaten on my prybars so much that they were bent. My entire body was in pain. I even broke some blades on my oscillating saw. Once the wood was removed, the silicone goo released a strong epoxy smell that permeated the house for days. I hope to god I never have to deal with that stuff again. That in itself is worth paying someone else to do, even if I can’t afford it, I’ll pay someone else to do it before I’ll do it again.

After removal of the pet stains and Devil’s Peanutbutter, We laid a vapor barrier (the green plastic) down. This is recommended as water can get trapped under the flooring and cause issues, though it differs based on where you live and what kind of foundation you have. Definitely google for more info on that from experts online. Where this material overlapped, we had to tape it with duct tape to keep it a single membrane. SOme places this caused the plastic to bunch up and for a few  months the floor was crinkly sounding in certain places until it settled.

That pic was also during the stage of permanently removing pet odors.

Typical wisdom says to start laying this flooring on an exterior wall since those are most likely to be straight.  We did, however as mentioned in our post of the kitchen tile to the hardwood floor transition, we got lucky and worked hard to get a nice end result. We might should have started on the other side of the room to make sure the tile lines up well.

Laying floor is hard work. You will need knee pads and the correct tools <LINK>

Floor installation kit: This comes with wall spacers, a metal pull bar for making the floor align length-wide, and a tapping block. Do not forgo this purchase or you will destroy the tongue and groove of your laminate at the ends of each row.

Good knee pads: I Recommend going to the store and trying on a bunch to see what feels good to you. i took a pair back because they sucked.

Hammer:

Cutting mat: So as not to mess up the floor.

Razor Knife:

Straight Edge

Bandsaw: You might want a better one, but this is what I have.

Underlayment: Again, research the particular type you need for your location and foundation type.

CORETEC Plus flooring.

 

It’s also back-breaking. Here’s me contemplating how much money I am saving versus how miserable I feel and whether it is worth it.

But the end results are totally worth it.  Though I might would pay a few thousand dollars for someone else to do it all (we had just as much and more complicated work upstairs as well.)

 

Now we did a terrible job we did on the complicated edges by the door frame and fireplace mantle. We cut the tile to match those angles, then had to use brown caulk to fill the inevitable gaps.  This is the wrong way to do it!  Instead you should use a vibrating saw to undercut the bottom of the moulding in the doorways and mantle and slide the floor underneath for a beautiful finish.

We of course cleaned it up a bit since the second pic, but just do it right the first time and there should be no problem.

Be sure to do the closets as well.

Before and after pics: