Installing Laminate at Sliding Glass Doors
Installing laminate at sliding glass doors can be a pain sometimes. There are so many different types of sliding glass door frames. The part that is mostly different is the bottom where the laminate will end. Some of the sliding door frames have a vertical edge that your laminate transition will butt up against. Others may be flush with the existing floor.
Knowing where the transition will be placed is important so you will know where to stop the laminate when installing it up to the sliding glass doors.
When installing laminate at sliding glass doors, you want the floor to be level with the rest of the room. You don't want the floor to slope down or up where the laminate meets the sliding glass door frame.
If the floor slopes up it will cause a hollow space underneath. If it slopes down your transition will not sit on the floor properly.
On concrete floors you may run across situations where they left a space between the concrete floor and the door frame. Other times you could find where someone tried to fill it in with something and it isn't level.
In order to fix this you will need to scrape off the high spots if any. A scraper with a sharp blade will do the trick most times. In some cases the concrete may be too hard so you may need to use a hammer and chisel to remove the stubborn areas. Putting a straight edge on the floor shows where the floor dips down in front of the sliding glass doors. This dip needs to be filled in with floor patch. Floor patch is fairly common, and is usually sold at Home Depot or Lowes.
Its easy to use, basically you just mix water with it. Most floor patching products dry in a short time, usually in about a half hour to an hour. If you try to use cement it will take a lot longer to dry, and it isn't as easy to spread.
Use a paint scraper or a patching trowel to spread the patch level. After the first layer, you will need to check it to make sure it is level. If not, you can go over it again with more floor patch after the first coat hardens. You can use a scraper to scrap off the excess floor patch.
Your end result is a level floor up to the sliding glass doors. In this particular case a square edge laminate transition will be used here. The square edge will butt up to the sliding glass door frame along the floor.
The transition will also sit on the area that I just filled in with the floor patch.
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