#Transition #Wood #floors #Sliding #Glass #DoorsTile
– [Jeff] Hi everybody! Jeff here again. Today we’re going to talk about a question we get asked quite a bit. And that is, how do I terminate my wood floor up against a sliding glass door? And the problem is, when you’re trying to do this,
The pieces that they sell in the big box stores like Home Depot, Floor and Decor, Lowe’s. It’s pretty pathetic. They don’t carry the proper piece that you need to do this. I’m going to show you here a sample of this. Here’s a profile of the piece that you need.
This is called a threshold piece. And they don’t stock it. It’s a special order. Which is strange, because often they come in and they don’t really match the wood that you’re using. So I always like to bring a sample with me to wherever I order it from. Sometimes Lumber Liquidators stocks them.
So I’ve gone down there before and I just bring a sample of the wood. And so, this is how the threshold piece is supposed to work. Now if you look at the profile here. See what it does here? It’s supposed to be right up against the cement, here on the bottom,
And then the overhang here goes over your wood floor. That gap is supposed to be in there. This allows for the wood floor to expand and contract, in and out, as the temperature increases, and humidity, and all that stuff. So, you have to have this part with you when you’re laying the floor.
You don’t just lay the floor and then as an afterthought go, “Oh, duh, what kind of transition piece am I gonna use?” So, I always have this with me, so that when I’m cutting each and every one of these planks here, they’re all about the same length
Because I know exactly how they need to line up to this thing to give me the right, exact spacing that we’re gonna need before we glue this piece down, okay? Now, the problem here, that you’re going to find quite a bit here, with the cement is, and I’ve done this for many years.
I’ve remodeled numerous places and the problem that we keep finding is the builders just can’t seem to make a nice, flat, level concrete floor and it really comes to fruition here at the very end where it meets up with your sliding glass doors. They’re usually wavy like this,
Up and down, up and down, and the problem with this one here. It’s pretty hard to see it, but I’ll show you in a minute, the results of it is that the concrete falls off a cliff here, just kinda really leans back and down there. Which, when you get over to here,
It keeps your piece from laying level. You see that? See how it wants to kinda lean backwards? It should be level like this. All right, so here’s what I’m talking about. As you can see on the far left of the sliding glass door here, the piece is laying fairly level.
We’ll just make up for that with a little bit of PL adhesive. But, watch this. As I start to slide over to the right, you’re gonna see this drop off rapidly. Like the ocean bottom, almost. Now you’re looking at a half inch gap in there. I could fit my entire finger under there.
So, and this is, you’re gonna see this going all the way across here. Now it’s like, you know, the thing wants to sit way back like that. So, what we’re going to do here is, we have these metal pieces. And if you go down to your hardware aisle,
Like a Home Depot, Lowe’s, what have you, one of the aisles there, they have these bins with all these. You can get metal strips that are 1/16 of an inch, 1/8 of an inch, a 1/4 of an inch. And then this one actually came with one of our T-moldings that we bought.
Sometimes they come as a little kit. And you put this under there and we’ll glue this down. This will give it some support. And now you can see it’s a lot more level. So as you kinda dry fit it here, you can see that’s gonna lay perfectly
Once it’s all glued down and everything. So, these are some of the things you’re going to have to deal with as you’re working with transition pieces. We’re also gonna show you today how to use this part here. This is called a T-transition here. T-Mold. You use this here wherever you meet
With a wood floor up against tile. So that’ll be in part two of the video. All right, so I’ve gone ahead and marked in the pencil here where I want my metal piece to start because it really doesn’t need to start until about here. And it’s gonna go all the way down here.
And then I have a second piece, after this one here, that connects down there. What we’re gonna do, is lay down a layer of PL adhesive. And then we’re gonna embed this in the adhesive. And then we’ll glue this part down on top of it,
Making sure that this part is all the way back. You want the threshold piece to be all the way against the track. And this is a good time to start straightening out all the little dents in your track if you have any. Try to get it as straight as you can. And remember,
You don’t glue it down to the wood here at all. You never glue it to the wood, because the wood needs to be free to go in and out as it expands and contracts underneath this threshold piece. So, the only piece you ever wanna glue it to,
Is this back track and on top of here on this metal piece. So, I usually do a big, thick glob right in there. And, that’s usually enough to hold it all down. All right, so now I’m just gonna lay down a generous portion of the PL adhesive here,
That we’re gonna embed the metal rail in. All right, so now I’m gonna embed this. There’s all of my adhesive there, construction adhesive. And I’m just gonna lay this down in there and let it mush in place. Hopefully it’ll be nice and flat, there. And I just have to come down and do the next piece.
So now I’m just laying down the adhesive here for the second piece of metal. All right, so we have the second piece embedding now. And now that we’ve got these all sitting where we want them, we then want to take our cut pieces and set them down here and do a dry fit
Before we glue them on top of here and just make sure that everything’s right. Okay, so now I’m taking my transition piece here. And I’m gonna put it on there and test it out. It looks pretty good. He’s staying, he’s laying nice and flat there.
And, keep in mind, once we glue it down, we’ll put some buckets, you’ll put a protective cloth down, and put some buckets on top of it to hold it down into place overnight until it’s dry. So, now I’m putting the adhesive on here. That’s gonna hold
The actual threshold piece of wood over it. I like to get it on the top and in the corners, as well. And, you don’t want to overdo it in the corners, like on this spot here, because when you push the piece in there it’s gonna ooze up a bit. Okay, so now that I have the adhesive down on top of the metal piece, I’m going to put my threshold piece of wood down here. You should always have enough glue on there so that when you’re pushing down on it, you’ll feel it kinda get firm and spongy as it’s settling in.
If you don’t feel that, then you don’t have enough glue down and the piece is just gonna pop back up as soon as somebody steps on it, most likely. Right up against the back of the metal rail there. And then here’s the other piece, the smaller piece. So this is sort of what stinks about all these threshold pieces, is the idiot manufacturers know that you have eight foot sliding glass doors, but they give you six foot pieces. So you always end up making, like, a two foot cut.
Now, you could cut it in the middle, but, you know, these pieces are very expensive. And we’re tired of getting these pieces and having to buy two every time, so we decided on this one here to cut this one at two feet,
And that way we have a four foot section to use next time. We won’t have to go and buy a second piece for the next door that we do. All right, so now that it’s glued down in place, just to make sure that it stays down, we’re gonna protect this here.
And I’ve just got my little tool bin that I’m gonna stick on there. It’ll hold it down until it dries overnight. And we’re gonna do one here and one at the other end. So here it is with all of the weights on it. We also like to use the small,
Round two and a half and five pound weights, you know, from the barbell sets. Those will work. Anything you have with weight on it will work. But just make sure that you protect the wood first with a cloth. So now let’s go on to take a look
At how we do the transition over against tile. So this is your T-Mold piece here and this is specifically used to help you transition between two level floors that are wood and tile like this. See how that fits in there like that? So, what you need to really do here,
Is when you put the piece down, you wanna put it all the way up against the tile like you see there. So all your glue goes, you can do a little bit underneath there. You want some on that little corner there. And then some underneath the transition piece, there.
Now, these often come with a flat piece of metal. That same metal that I just showed you when we used on the threshold. And you can put that under there to fill that gap. You really don’t want to use your adhesive to be your gap filler, to be a reinforcement,
Or to be structured. So that’s why we put the metal down and we glue this down to the metal. Now, what happens if your tile was up a lot higher and you’re like that instead of, you know, flat. Then you would use what they call a reducer piece. But this T-molding here
Is going to work just absolutely perfect here. So I want to show you the cut that we made. Okay, so what’s often a challenge is, this one here was done at an angle, so we used one of those template ruler tools to help, you know, find the angle and all that.
And we cut this piece at an angle here, at this end here, so that it would line up there with that baseboard. And then over here, down at this end here, what we did was, you see, we got kinda sporty with the cut and wrapped it around the corner of the baseboard there.
So as we dry fit it and lay it down flat, we see that it’s looking real perfect here. So, this is how you transition between the wood and the tile. Now, we’ve seen some people in the past just say, well just do a clean edge. Don’t even do this.
They want you to take the edge of the wood and run it straight to the tile. The problem is, is there’s two problems. One, you’d have lippage, because they’re not gonna be the exact same height. And two, the wood has to have room to expand. You’re supposed to leave about 1/2 inch
For the wood to expand, go in and out, in and out, on this wood here. And so, if you run this all the way up to the cement, to the tile here, you’re likely to just buckle the wood floor. That would be very, very bad. So you always want to follow the directions
Of the manufacturer. And I’ve never seen one, ever, that says, “Oh sure, you can run the wood all the way up to the tile.” “No problem.” No, you can’t. So that’s why you always have to have some type of transition. And this piece here, this is another one of my complaints,
Is sometimes at the stores, when they sell you this wood they don’t stock the matching transition piece that goes with it. So, in this case, we just kinda found one that looked pretty close in color. And that’s the way it sort of works for you.
So I’m just running a bead of this adhesive, right in the corner there where it’s gonna rest on the corner of the tile. And make sure you know which side you’re putting it on. Because you don’t want to put it on the wrong side and then you’re screwed.
Okay, so we’ve now glued it down. And remember it’s important, when you’re putting this down, no glue goes on this side of the T. All the glue is only on that side. And a little bit might ooze out underneath. You just wipe it off like this. You can use a wet cloth, too.
But you don’t ever glue it to the floor on this side because the floor has to be able to expand and contract underneath it. So that’s it! That’s how you do the transition pieces from the wood to the tile, and from the wood floor to the sliding glass door.
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