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In this video I want to talk to you about luxury vinyl flooring, why I like
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it and what to look out for if you're considering it for your own home. Now
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this is a couple of scraps from a job I was involved with and right away you can
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see one of the advantages of what they generically called luxury vinyl flooring
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This is actually luxury vinyl plank. The original pieces were about this long
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These are just some scraps. Generically there's another term called luxury vinyl
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tile which is the same sort of thing but it's just square so it's just a shape
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issue. But you see how it's flexible? That's a really big advantage because
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many sub floors aren't all that flat. They're certainly not flat enough for
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laminates which require no more than a quarter of an inch of deviation from
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perfectly flat in a 10-foot radius. Now that's a pretty tall order. There are
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ways of flattening an existing floor. Some are more troublesome than others
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but wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to worry about flattening at all? And that's where the flexibility comes in. Another thing I really like about
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luxury vinyl is how tough it is. I've seen it in commercial situations and
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open to the public, outdoor shoes on all the time and all weather and it's gone
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for years with no change in appearance. I'm going to be doing a little torture
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test comparison later on in this video where I'm going to take a piece of
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finished wood, three coats of the toughest urethane I know and I'm going
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to compare the toughness of urethane finished wood with luxury vinyl plank
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Another thing I like about this type of flooring is something that's just come
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up recently. The original versions of all kinds of luxury vinyl tile, luxury vinyl
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flooring, that would be plank and tile, used to click together. So it was a free
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floating floor, pieces clicked together, they held together and that was the
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standard for a long time. There's two problems with that though. The biggest
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problem is if you do get damage, and any flooring can be damaged, if you do get a
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piece damaged in say the middle of the room and it's a click-together
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installation, you can't just take that piece out because it's interlocked with
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its neighbors. So you need to remove, unclick, pile up somewhere else all the
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flooring leading up to that damaged spot and then take the damaged one out, put a
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fresh one in and then replace all the flooring again. Not so with something
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like this. And if you take a look, the edges are just, they're just square. So
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you might think well how does it fasten down? How does it stop from moving around
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This particular type of luxury vinyl is best installed with a kind of pressure
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sensitive adhesive. The stuff we used here comes in a big tub, you roll it on
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to the subfloor with a roller after that subfloor is nice and clean and it
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creates a surface that's sticky enough to hold the flooring down but not so
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sticky that you can't pull a piece up if you want to for repairs. It's a system
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that works well. I've tried this pulling up business and it couldn't be better
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It's firmly in place but you get a sharp tool around an edge, you start to pull
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it up, it peels off. In fact the remaining flooring is actually still sticky so you
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can even put the new piece down on top. Another reason I like this better than
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click style is because sometimes if the interface between the interlocking click
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parts doesn't offer enough friction, those parts can move apart end-to-end. They can slide apart under foot traffic, you know, the movement from walking on it
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vibrations, things like that. Then that's a problem because if you want to fix
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that, well you've got to somehow jam the flooring back together again but not
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before you put a little glue on the end tongue that came apart. It's a pain
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and it's always best to avoid pains when you can. So that issue is completely
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solved by this style of flooring. Now there are different thicknesses and
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different types and I'm not saying that all luxury vinyl flooring is as tough as
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what you'll see here but most of the stuff I've seen is. And toughness
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is an excellent quality when you want a wood look floor. Now I say wood look, this
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isn't wood, this is made from a photograph of wood and it's quite
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authentic. I mean I'm a woodworker, I know wood. If I was looking at that floor
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I wouldn't be able to tell that it's not real wood. And to be honest I do like the
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authenticity of real wood but not so much that I want to have that hardwood
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floor sanded and refinished every four or five, six years, maybe even more often
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if you've got a lot of traffic in your house, dogs with claws, things like that
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One other thing that's easy to like about luxury vinyl is how it's cut
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when it's installed. Regular hardwood flooring, laminates, they're usually cut with a saw. So you got to get down on the ground next to the saw, you start the
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saw up, it's a big noise, it's a big plume of dust, you know that's just the way
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it's been done for years. But this stuff just cuts with a knife, just a utility
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knife and a straightedge. So you don't even need to crawl over to the saw and
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make it cut and crawl back again and put your piece in place. You just have your straightedge, your square, your knife, cut, fit, move on to the next one. So all in
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all I'm impressed, it works really well. Now notice for a minute too how this
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particular pattern, wood grain pattern, is intentionally imperfect. What you're seeing here is what rough lumber would look like if it was only partially
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planed. So you've got these intentional marks left over from the sawing of the
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lumber, you know there's a few kind of areas like this, there might be the odd
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knot that you can see. There's an advantage in that too, if it suits the
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character of your room. And the advantage is that this kind of flooring does not
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show dirt nearly as much as a visually perfect piece of clear maple or clear oak
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or something like that. You've got intentional diversity here, visual diversity, and that just makes the floor look maybe cleaner than it really is. I'm
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not suggesting that you keep a dirty house, but it can be a pain when every
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little bit of fluff or debris or a little leaf or something like that that's come
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into your house shows up. And with this kind of pattern you don't run into that
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Now that said, not all luxury vinyl has this very look, so you're going to want
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to pay attention to that
