JK Guide: How to fit flooring to your van conversion.

Mark shows how to fit flooring to your van conversion. 

(00:00) Welcome back to Just Kampers and project 2022 so in this video we're going to be fitting our flooring. So we've got our ply lining flooring that's going to go down and then we've got a vinyl that's going to go down on top of that so i'll run through how to fit the ply lining floor and then how to fit our vinyl on top of that. A real simple simple selection of tools we have today we have our drill and a 3mm drill bit we have screws to secure our ply lining floor down to our floor and we've got our adhesive that we're

(00:28) going to use to glue our vinyl down to our wooden floor and obviously some brushes to be able to move this stuff around. So we've got our plier lining board it's a a 9mm thick ply liner as you can see we've got it cut to the exact shape of our van now we were fortunate enough to have an old ply lining board that we took out and used as a template and obviously we've just removed a little bit of extra to make room for our carpet now you can buy pre-cut flooring online or if you want to make your own template do it that way and

(01:01) then buy your wood and cut it out for with it with your template that you've made. As you can see it's not fixed down so what we're going to do we're going to actually drill through our ply lining and drill through into our floor and then fix it with a countersunk screw and that'll be a nice flush fitting through the wood, and then once we've done all the way around, obviously we're going to do we need to be careful of this area here this particular area here underneath is the fuel tank so we don't want to be drilling down with a massive long drill

(01:28) bit and going into our fuel tank that'll be an after disaster, so we've only got very short screws and we're going to use a short drill bit and just be very careful once you've gone through the wood and you're going through the metal you need to go very slowly cut the metal only because you could go into either a fuel line, or the fuel tank would be a nightmare. As I said before, we need to pay special attention to this area because our field tank is right below, so we're only going to pick out a few spots to fix this side of the floor

(02:15) because this is the larger part of the wood we probably don't need as many fixings so we'll start let's start with this corner on here i think by the step we're gonna fix it and then we'll do a couple in the middle we should be good just throw our wood and now we need to be careful going through the metal part of the floor there we go and we're through so we can get one fixing in there by hand with the screwdriver first and then we can get our bit on our screw on our drill afterwards once we've got a few more drilled

(02:56) just make sure that that's yeah it feels good excellent okay let's get a few more drilled this is our vinyl flooring that we've laid over the top of our plywood this is a very heavy duty vinyl it's used in most sort of campervan conversions so what we've done we've bought this and this is actually pre-cut although it's not perfect so we've had to do some trimming around the edges to get it to sit really nice but it's a good start as you can see that side is still a little bit large but we're going to work our way over

(03:34) there and then trim that as well so we're going to start at this side as you can see we've had it laid down it's nice and flat i'm going to peel this edge back sort of about a quarter of our size of our floor and put our adhesive down now we're using the contact adhesive so that means we put adhesive on both parts so we're going to put it on the bottom of the flooring and onto the wood and then as it goes together it should contact but you have to let it go tacky so we're going to crack on with that we're going to get this first side done

(04:03) and then move across and then i'll show you how to trim the other side so we can use a contact adhesive with a brush appliance it is pretty smelly so it's recommended to use it in a well ventilated area or use a mask i'm going to put mask on [Music] [Music] the glue has now sort of gone off is touch dry on both surfaces so we're going to start working it back nice and gently so we don't get any air bubbles as you see i'll take this a little bit here okay so we're just gently going to roll it back should sort of sit back into its

(04:55) original position where we've had it laid out for a little while again you just need to take your time be patient some of these floor vinyls can be really rough so it might be a good idea to wear gloves if yours is particularly rough this isn't too bad it's got quite a nice non-slip surface but it's not too too rough so i'm just going to work the last corners in with our little magic wooden tools this is the same tool we use for doing the carpeting just allows you to as you can see i've got a little bit of that lino to push in

(05:48) okay so that's this part stuck we're now going to roll the vinyl back this way and stick the other side as you can see we've rolled the non-glued part of the vinyl back over the top of the part that we've just glued and now we can start working back this way so we're going to work in sections of that size so it's basically i'm going to come to here with our glue there with our glue and then we'll do the last section before we have to trim the edges our next step is to get the vinyl fitting in this corner really nicely as

(06:30) you saw before there was a little bit of oversize on our vinyl mat that has been pre-cut so we're just trimming it for perfection so the easiest way to do that is i've got a hot air gun you can use a hair dryer anything just to soften that vinyl a little bit so give it a little bit of heat obviously don't go too far because you want to burn it you don't want to burn your carpet so we lift it away and just gently put some heat through the corner where you where you want to push it into now once we've got some warmth into our

(06:58) vinyl i use my little magic wooden tool and then we push that vinyl into the corner and then you can actually see a line of where we need to cut and we just mark above that and trim it and then try it and then we can just trim a little bit at the time so you don't want to trim too much off in one hit so again handy use of a marker and then we've got our sharp scissors to cut the vinyl with and then once we've got that corner perfect then we can move on and move all the way down and trim the rest of it and then glue our last bit.

(07:32) So as you can see that's the floor glued down all in position and trim both sides, i think it looks really good now, so we've got great all the way around. I've got a lovely grey floor carpeting, looks really good the roof looks really good