Luxury vinyl plank is popular for good reason — but the fastest way to ruin any floor is to install it over a subfloor that dips, squeaks or holds moisture.
Luxury vinyl plank has taken over residential flooring in the last decade, and mostly deservedly. It is genuinely waterproof, it handles pets and kids, and modern printing makes it look far better than the vinyl of twenty years ago.
But the product is only half the job. The other half is underneath it.
Flatness is not the same as level
A floor can be perfectly level and still be unacceptably wavy, and it is waviness — not slope — that causes problems. Most flooring manufacturers specify a maximum deviation over a given span, and exceeding it voids the warranty.
Dips cause a floating floor to flex underfoot, which stresses the click-lock joints until they separate. Once a seam opens in a floating floor, it will keep opening.
This is why we check flatness with a straightedge before we quote, and why leveling compound sometimes appears on an estimate. It is not padding, and skipping it is the most common cause of a floor failing early.
Moisture, particularly on slab and in basements
Concrete releases moisture for a long time, and vapor coming up through a slab will destroy adhesive and can grow mold under a floating floor even when the product itself is waterproof.
If we are going over concrete, we test rather than assume, and we specify the right underlayment or vapor barrier for the result.
Squeaks are fixed before, not after
A squeaky subfloor will still squeak under a brand-new floor, and by then it is inaccessible. Refastening loose subfloor panels to the joists takes an hour before installation and is essentially impossible afterward.
We always walk the bare subfloor and refasten before anything goes down.
Expansion gaps and transitions
Every hard-surface floor moves with temperature and humidity, and it needs a gap at every perimeter to do that — covered by baseboard or quarter-round, never caulked solid.
A floor installed tight to the walls has nowhere to go and will peak in the middle of the room during the first humid summer. It is a completely avoidable failure and we see it constantly.
We also undercut door casings so plank runs beneath them rather than being scribed around, which is both cleaner and faster than it looks.
Planning a flooring project? Call (812) 259-0159 and we will look at the subfloor before we talk about product.