How to Cut Laminate Wood Flooring

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson, and I'm going to talk to you about how to cut laminate wood flooring. Now the reason we have to cut the laminate wood flooring is that as we're laying it down the wood comes in varying lengths and we want to make sure we keep a good staggered pattern as we're laying that down. And then as you get to the edges, we always need to leave of least of about three eighths of an inch gap around the edge between the edge of the laminate floor and the wall. And the reason we do that is that laminate wood flooring or any kind of wood flooring will expand and contract as moisture and temperature changes in the room. So if you don't allow for any space, it can buckle up against the wall and cause cracks, splintering or buckling in your floor. So when we do get to those end of our runs, then what we will do is we will find four dimension between the end of the last piece and the wall and we're going to deduct three eighths of an inch. So if we came up with a dimension that was thirteen and five eights then what we would do is we would find our thirteen and five eighths mark on the wood, which is here and then we would deduct one, two, three eighths in order to account for the space I need between the wall and I will put a mark. Now the easiest way to cut it is to use a chop saw such as this. Now when we do cut and measure the one thing that we've got to make sure is that one end of the laminate flooring will have a tab such as this and the other end will have a slot. So you always want to make sure that you've got it oriented so that if you have a tab on the flooring end then we need the slot end on this end. So we don't want to cut this end, we want to cut the end with the tab or in other words we want to cut the same end as the end we were measuring from on the floor. Now we can either draw the line and get this lined up or if you have the saw that has the laser guide built in to it then all we need to do is start the saw, then line up the pencil mark on the laser line and make our cut. And it's always important to make sure that you have safety glasses to protect your eyes whenever you're using any kind of a power tool. So here we go, we'll demonstrate. Now a chop saw, make sure that you have a nice consistent ninety degree angle. And then the space that is left between this and the wall will be covered up by a corner round or a base shoe molding later. So again as you can see when we cut this we end up with a solid piece, so we gotta make sure that the piece on the floor has the tab so that will fit right in place and then we can either glue or nail it in place depending on our application. So I'm Tim Gipson with how to cut laminate wood flooring."