Is Vinyl Flooring the Right Choice for your Home?
Vinyl flooring has been used in homes for years, due to its durability, maintenance and cost benefits. Today, there’s an expanded selection of vinyl flooring products that offer better performance and broader style options than ever before—with incredibly realistic natural stone, wood and tile looks available to savvy shoppers.
Luxury vinyl flooring (LVF) is thicker and stronger than vinyl flooring of old, and it’s extremely versatile as well. It’s available in planks (LVP), which typically resemble the look of authentic hardwood planks, as well as tiles (LVT), which normally look like authentic stone and tile flooring. Due to the broad range of realistic looking styles available today, as well as cost and performance benefits, luxury vinyl flooring is a popular choice for any room in homes—even moisture prone spaces like bathrooms, kitchens and basements. It’s also a prevalent commercial flooring product that can withstand heavy use and wear.
What is luxury vinyl flooring?
Traditional vinyl flooring, available in sheets or tiles, has long been the flooring product of choice for moisture-prone rooms throughout a home. Basically, all the spots were the baking, bathing and all types of washing are done. It’s also a popular choice for any rooms below floor-level, which are susceptible to moisture-related issues. While standard vinyl is still an affordable option, it does come with some limitations. It’s comprised of a relatively thin vinyl layer, printed design layer and a protective coating. This doesn’t give it a lot of cushion—making it feel hard underfoot. It’s also relatively vulnerable to scratches, tears and other wear, especially in heavy use locations.
Luxury vinyl flooring has been around since the 1970s, coming into popularity in the 1980s, and it’s continued to benefit from manufacturing and material improvements. Namely, it’s thicker, with the product itself ranging from 2 - 15 mm. This includes a wear later, which is rated in mils, with a thicker wear layer indicating a tougher floor. Some flooring stores may offer products with wear layers ranging from 6 - 28 mils thick.
Types of Vinyl Flooring:
As previously noted, vinyl is available in planks, tiles and sheet. Here’s a little about each type, including the styles and advantages.
- Luxury Vinyl Plank (LVP) - Luxury vinyl plank flooring is created to deliver the beauty and style of hardwood floors, all at a lower cost. Vinyl planks offer versatile looks to match any design style, including many colors and textures, with very realistic reproductions of the most popular wood species. Luxury vinyl planks are available in several formats and lengths up to 6 feet long, suiting the long plank trend popular with today’s hardwood flooring. The advantages of vinyl planks over the real hardwood alternative include the weather and moisture resistance, easy care, high durability against high traffic and wear, and significantly lower price point of most products.
- Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT) - For a stone tile look at an affordable price, luxury vinyl tile flooring offers a suitable solution for kitchens, bathrooms and more. These engineered tiles reproduce a wide range of tile looks, from the natural beauty of stone to the more contemporary concrete appearance. The individual squares of tile are often easy to assemble, groutable, and the finished product is durable and low maintenance. You can also mix many glue-down vinyl tile and planks, without needing a transition strip.
- Sheet - Vinyl sheet flooring offers versatile looks from hardwood to stone, as well as sheets with patterned designs. The sheets are cost competitive, durable against stains and wear, and easy to maintain, making them a great product for any home or building.
Construction:
Traditional sheet vinyl and luxury vinyl flooring are very different products, although they are based on essentially the same PVC layer and a protective coating. Luxury vinyl flooring is made up of multiple layers to improve the performance. Here are the layers that typically make up luxury vinyl flooring:
- Solid PVC backing layer
- Fiberglass backing layer
- Cushion layer for comfort
- Design layer with the printed image
- Wear layer/s for protection and shine
There are several luxury vinyl construction options that will provide a solution to just about any flooring situation:
- Glue Down (Dryback) - This category includes planks and tiles that can be glued down over plywood underlayment or to a roll out floating underlayment such as Underfloor or MUL (Mannington Underlayment), using a pressure sensitive adhesive. Most tiles are also groutable, giving them a very realistic tile look. However, the luxury vinyl tiles carry many advantages over traditional tile. For instance, they are warmer and softer than ceramic or porcelain.
- Floating Click - This is a favorite format of do-it-yourselfers. Click planks and tiles do not require underlayment or glue, so they can be applied over any flat surface. There are some limitations to the size of area that can be installed this way, and may require more transitions than glue-down installations.
- Enhanced Backed - These are floating click vinyl planks and tiles with a composite backing on them for extra stability. Some also come with foam or cork on the back for sound deadening. However, this is not a requirement for this type of floor, and those that come without a backing are still very quiet. You may hear the term “WPC” to identify these products. This term can mean “water-proof core” or “wood-particle core” depending on the manufacturer. Either way they are sold as 100% waterproof products.
All of these vinyl flooring products come with a polyurethane or acrylic finish. For extra durability, many luxury vinyl flooring products also have aluminum oxide or ceramic bead infused into the finish.
Is luxury vinyl right for my room?
There are many reasons new homeowners and remodelers alike are opting for luxury vinyl flooring. People looking for the following features should consider this stylish option.
- High durability - One advantage over hardwood or some traditional tile floorings is its durability. Vinyl withstands everyday life—even in active households with kids, pets, scrapes and spills. It’s resistant to scratching, scruffs and stains. It’s also mold and mildew resistant.
- Water resistance - Due to its moisture resistance, it’s a popular choice in areas with challenging climates, such as the Midwest, which is subject to drastic temperature changes, as well as high humidity in the summer months. It also works well in spaces such as basements, laundry rooms and bathrooms, which often have moisture issues.
- Waterproof options –As noted, some luxury vinyl flooring products are even considered waterproof and won’t swell when exposed to water. For instance, COREtec Plus boasts a patented construction and features the innovative COREtec core structure—an extruded core made from recycled wood and bamboo dust as well as limestone and virgin PVC—resulting in a 100% waterproof flooring product. Stone plastic composite, solid polymer core, or SPC flooring, is another option in the enhanced flooring category, offering superior performance for many problematic applications.
- The beauty of natural wood or stone - Luxury vinyl plank has come a long way in appearance, and it can very closely resemble the look, as well as feel, of hardwood. Like hardwood, it’s available in many different colors, sizes and finishes, including the look of handscraped and other distressed-look hardwoods. Vinyl tiles are also available to closely resemble a wide range of stone tile options.
Popular Luxury Vinyl Flooring Looks
Luxury vinyl flooring trends tend to follow fashions for authentic hardwood as well as tile flooring. Today, there’s a whole lot of variety available, with a color, pattern and size plank or tile available to suit anyone’s home style.
When it comes to LVP colors, there’s a forest of possibilities. Grey and whitewashed faux-wood LVP flooring is popular today, suiting many of today’s farmhouse and casual trends. Other light-colored wood-looks like honey and blonde are also popular, suiting a mix of styles including breezy beach looks and cool Scandinavian looks. On the other end of the color wheel, high-variant or mixed color planks can create a dramatic statement in your room, and dark wood flooring options are bold yet versatile options that can suit homes from traditional to modern. LVT flooring also offers a wide range of colors, including popular gray stone looks, as well as other nature-inspired hues.
Size of the planks and tiles can greatly impact the overall appearance of the floor. Wider and longer planks continue to be popular choices. These large planks can help to create the illusion of a more airy and open space. Narrow Planks (4" width) have also been making a comeback with Coretec and Stanton both introducing options in 2021.
You may also consider large format tiles to create the illusion of a more spacious floor, or choose mixed width tiles for a more personalized and unique look.
For many, there is no choice but real hardwood flooring. It’s the only thing that looks quite like it, and it’s worth the cost and wear issues. For others, tile will always reign supreme. However, if you have a wood or style look in mind but other factors like cost, durability and maintenance rank high in your selection process, you may opt for luxury vinyl flooring. There’s a reason it’s such a popular choice in any range of applications.
There continues to be advancements in flooring technology, with new products being introduced. For instance, digitally printed flooring is a new product category with Trucor introducing their 3DP line of SPC flooring. It features a 3D image, digitally printed onto an SPC core. We will continue to see many more digitally printed products being introduced. Visit a flooring store to see the different styles, learn about the latest advances in flooring products, and feel the difference for yourself.