The next morning, I knew I was not as far along on this project as I wanted to be, but I still had plenty of time to wrap it up. The mold issue seemed to be resolved, but I needed to find out where the water was coming from when I put the laundry tub cabinet back.
I needed to undercut the door jambs to slip the flooring under them. I achieved the undercutting using my Milwaukee M12® oscillating tool and a piece of the flooring. I used the height of the flooring to guide the oscillating tool around the door jambs.
The back door threshold was going to be an issue. I did not want to remove it to install the flooring under it. In fact, I attempted to remove it, and it was not going anywhere. I had removed the threshold under the garage door the last time I installed flooring. I routed a rabbet on the inside edge of the threshold to tuck the flooring under. Regrettably, the rabbet was too high, and stuff gets stuck between the threshold and flooring when I sweep that room.
I chose to undercut the threshold with my Milwaukee M12® oscillating tool. Not my best work. The tool kept moving around on the piece of flooring causing uneven cutting and splintering. You could not see my screw-up unless you got your eyeballs close to the floor. All the undercutting was now completed. Now I needed to sweep the floor of sawdust and start with the templating.
I have become good at templating. I have strips of chip board, a hot-glue gun and scissors. I laid the chip board around the perimeter of the room and glued them with the hot-glue gun. I use scissors to cut pieces to fit. I really wish I took a picture of the copper piping for the laundry tub. I believe the floor joist underneath might have been an issue for the plumber, but there was a lot of exposed piping under the laundry tub cabinet. I initially was going to lay the flooring under the piping but later decided to just run the flooring around it. Nobody was going to see it anyways.
When I bought the vinyl flooring, I laid it out in one of the bedrooms upstairs to get it to lay flat. So, with my template, scissors, marker, and painters’ tape, upstairs I went to cut out the flooring. Carefully lining up the template to two factory edges of the flooring, I taped the template to it. Now I had only two sides to cut. I took the marker and traced the two sides that needed cutting. I proceeded to start cutting. The cutting of the floor with the scissors was not too bad, but my hand was sore after I was done. I rolled the floor up and headed back to the laundry room to give the flooring a dry fit.
When I got back to the laundry room, I unrolled the flooring. The laundry tub piping was in the way. The gas shutoff valve was also in the way. I cut around the copper piping, but I was too aggressive trying to lay down the flooring that I tore it by the gas shutoff valve. Nobody will know. I finally got it to lay flat and I tucked the flooring under the door jambs and threshold. The flooring needed some minor trimming around the walls and threshold. Once I took care of that, the flooring was ready to glue down.
I stood back to examine my work. Not bad, but I have done better. I was not sure why, but I was not happy that I decided to cut around the copper piping. Too late and nobody would know. I grabbed the adhesive and trowel from the plastic bag and attempted to read the instructions. The writing was so small and blurry. I looked up the instructions online so I could read them. Guess what? I got the wrong adhesive. The adhesive was more like contact cement. Roll it on and wait 2-4 hours for it to get tacky. Nope, that was not going to work…