How to Install a Vinyl Floor - Do It Yourself

If the vinyl floor in your kitchen is old and scarred up, replace it! Armstrong Flooring has a wide range of color and styles to choose from to brighten up your kitchen. And best of all, it’s not expensive and you can do it yourself!

MATERIALS
-Armstrong vinyl flooring
-Armstrong flooring installation kit
-notched trowel
-vinyl flooring adhesive
-utility knife (comes with flooring kit)
-pry bar
-hammer
-masking tape
-putty knife

GETTING STARTED
First remove all appliances from the kitchen area i.e. stove, refrigerator etc.
Next remove the quarter round from the baseboard. To do this, take a pry bar and a hammer. Put the pry bar on top of the quarter round and gently tap it with a hammer to get the pry bar between the quarter round and the wall. Once that’s done, gently pry the quarter round away from the wall. Repeat this process up the wall to remove the quarter round.

Once that’s done, you’re ready to use the flooring kit to measure and mark the dimensions of your new vinyl floor.

INSTALLING THE FLOOR
The Armstrong flooring kit makes this job much easier than it used to be. The kit comes with a utility knife and several large sheets of paper. Take the first piece of paper, and lay it up against the wall and into a corner. Then use masking tape to keep it in place, taping it to the baseboard in this case. Take the next piece of paper and put it next to the first piece with a slight overlap. Then use masking tape and tape one piece of paper to the next. Do this all the way around the kitchen until your floor is covered. Once you’ve done that, cut away any excess paper. The effect is that you are creating a template from which you’ll cut your new vinyl floor.

TIP: In each kitchen there are corners, so you will more than likely have excess paper here. To cut it correctly so your new floor will fit, smooth the paper down in the corner to where you create a crease in the excess paper. Then take a putty knife, put it in the crease, and take a utility knife to cut away the excess paper. The putty knife acts as a straight edge for you to cut along so that the utility knife blade doesn’t slip and make an incorrect cut.

Once you’ve got your paper template laid out, use more masking tape to reinforce the entire area. Then roll it up, and you’re ready to lay it out over your new vinyl flooring material.

Lay the template down over the flooring material, tape it in place and you’re ready to cut. Use the utility knife that comes with the flooring kit and cut along the template. The vinyl flooring cuts very easily.
TIP: When you make your cut, skip over the tape you used to secure the template to the new flooring. This will prevent the template from shifting and causing an incorrect cut. Once you’ve cut the flooring out all the way around, then go back and cut the flooring under the tape.

Once your flooring is cut, simply take it to the kitchen and unroll it to make sure it fits.
Once it’s in place, use a notched trowel to apply vinyl flooring adhesive to keep your floor in place.

Then wait 24 hours before re-installing your quarter round and appliances and your kitchen will look great!

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[kendrak]

This was uploaded 3 years ago but everything about it screams the 90's 😄

[hamilton]

I never would have thought of creating a template. This is brilliant! Thank you for posting.

[ciaran]

I used to be a carpet/vinyl fitter.
This is the nuttiest way to lay vinyl that I've ever seen

[susanhaze]

Extra tips:
#1 (learned when Armstrong used to sell a “trim & fit kit” very much like what she’s using): when you lay out the paper on the existing floor (and you don’t need really special paper, you can get inexpensive rolls of even brown paper from an office supply chain store), besides taping the edges of the paper sheets together you can make it impossible for the paper to accidentally slip around or to not lay completely flat, so the temple is absolutely perfect. Use a sharp razor blade in a utility knife or x-acto hobby knife—or you can even hold the razor blade alone if you’re not accident prone—and throughout the plane of paper, every 12 to 16 inches or so in all directions across the paper LIGHTLY slice a V shape about an inch tall just through the paper. Then flip the paper point of that V up to create small triangular holes. You can then press small, roughly square, pieces of 1+1/4 or 1+1/2 inch wide masking tape across those holes so that the paper is lightly attached to the floor and completely smooth. After you make the template as she’s demonstrated, remove it slowly so that the tape remains on the paper and bridging the holes. Then when you lay the template on the new vinyl sheet, the tape will lightly stick to the new vinyl and not shift around at all.
#2 It’s really important that you don’t use the template on vinyl that’s colder than the room it needs to fit. Lay it somewhere that’s about the same temperature as the room you’re going to put it in & leave it there awhile to relax, lose its memory of having been rolled up, and to do any slight expanding it may need to do, because it will have slightly contracted if it spent time anywhere colder than the room you’ll be laying it in. If you use the template on cold vinyl and then move it to the warm room where you intend to attach it, it’ll slightly expand in that room and turn out to be just slightly larger than the space you cut it for! That’ll make it buckle, and you’ll have to fight & do some trimming to get it to fit.
#3 consider using newfangled adhesive that will allow you to lift & reposition the vinyl if necessary. if any foreign crumb has sneaked in under the vinyl (you can slide around in socks to feel for such things) it’s nice to be able to pull the vinyl away from easy-release adhesive to get to the crumb and remove it without having to worry that your adhesive has already gotten an iron grip on the vinyl and that lifting it could easily make the vinyl tear! In fact, if you used traditional adhesive and then find a pimple created by a crumb, you’ll be much safer making a very small V cut through the vinyl to pick it out than to fight traditional adhesive, unless the pimple is so close to the edge of the vinyl that you don’t have much vinyl to pry up.
#4 lastly, it’s well worth the money to rent a 50 to 75 pound roller that you can push around like a lawnmower after you’ve glued down the vinyl. Some big box stores will even loan you a roller for free. You’ll want to carry it to the center of the room and roll away from the center in all directions just 3 feet at a time, eventually working all the way to the edges. That’ll get rid of any air bubbles under the vinyl, so that every bit of it is in full contact with the floor. Leaving any bubbles can later bite you in the butt when you push furniture into or around the room, because an edge can catch on an innocent looking bubble and stretch a tear through your new floor. Don’t be at all nervous, it’s very easy to fit & install vinyl if you just avoid these few pitfalls. Enjoy,

[armandopatane]

I’m a man and pretty good luck with almost everything especially cars= BUT THIS VIDEO IS THE MOST INFORMATIVE SENSIBLE VIDEO IVE SEEN SO FAR = attempting to vinyl floor my 16x18 dining room = never done before = THANK YOU 🙏 GOOD JOB = I never thought about a template

[Agrillot]

I have been begging for help on this damn floor for ages! I’ve been walking around on a subfloor For 5 years after peeling up the nasty CARPET that was in my BATHROOM 😩🤮 I am very thankful for this video and I have huge rolls of painters brown masking paper so I think a template is the way to go.

[Insane]

Absolutely wonderful and perfect looking - the floor was good too

[lawrenceking]

Wasn't this show on in the late 90s early 2000s? I knew I had watched this before. Amazing the info is still valid.

[PraiseDog]

Beautiful! Great instructions on the floor as well.

[ThatUCant]

Fabulous easy to follow video. Thank you! I'm all set to install my flooring.

[Kewlzz]

Thanks for sharing!
Perfect template and easy installation.
I’m doing my bathroom floor and I’ll share my pics with you soon!

[moselc]

This is the proof I needed. She said Vinyl... in 2020 that typically means vinyl plank. But she put a 1 sheet vinyl in a 1980's kitchen. This is a late 1990's video. I wish they added that into the description because it induces nostalgia.

[plutonictogba]

Thanks so much for this video. I followed step by step and I did my kitchen

[thebestken]

Looks like you need to replace that carpet too 😂

[dougrobinson]

I always did my floors. But this time I got them ready and hired it done. At 67 I don't crawl around like I use too.

[nathanscott]

no do not use channel locks to remove the gas line. the gas line nut has flat sides for a reason, and its not for channel locks.

[johncarlos]

Where to lay out if you dont have the space? Outside?

[hfcsheepdog]

Should use a backup on that Gas Connector Fitting, but thanks for a truly helpful video.

[paulfalstad]

She has looks, skills, intelligence...dynamite! Thank you for showing a novice the way to manhandle flooring!

[edenmolinar]

Nicely done and really-really-really nice hair spray, it seems to hold really well.