Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring

Luxury vinyl plank has become the default for a lot of Minnesota homes for a straightforward reason: it handles moisture. Basements, entryways, kitchens, laundry rooms and bathrooms are exactly the places where hardwood cups and laminate swells, and LVP does not.

The install itself is mostly about the floor underneath. Plank is thin and it telegraphs whatever it is laid over, so high spots get ground down and low spots get filled before anything is clicked together. Skip that and you get hollow-sounding spots and joints that separate later.

What this covers

• New luxury vinyl plank installation
• Subfloor assessment, leveling and prep
• Removal and disposal of old flooring
• Transitions, thresholds and trim
• Basement, kitchen, bath and whole-home installs

Why LVP works below grade

Most Minnesota basements sit on a concrete slab, and concrete is never really dry. Water vapor moves up through the slab year-round, faster in summer when the ground is warm and the basement air is cool. Hardwood and laminate both react to that vapor because both are wood. Vinyl plank is not wood, so the plank has nothing to swell.

The same logic covers entryways in winter. Boots come in loaded with snow and road salt, the snow melts, and the water sits at the door until somebody wipes it up. A wood floor in that spot cups within a couple of seasons. Plank shrugs it off.

Waterproof describes the plank, not the room. If a floor drain backs up or a water heater lets go, water still gets under the flooring and sits on the slab, and the floor has to come up to dry the slab underneath.

If a basement takes on water every spring, flooring is the wrong first purchase. Grading, gutters and the drain tile come first. Put a floor down over an active water problem and you will be pulling it up again.

The subfloor decides the result

Manufacturers publish a flatness tolerance, a maximum deviation across a set span, and that number is not a suggestion. Plank is thin and has no stiffness of its own, so it follows the shape of whatever is under it. A dip you cannot see becomes a soft spot underfoot and, eventually, a row of joints worked apart.

On a slab we run a straightedge in both directions and mark what stands proud and what falls away. High spots get ground down. Low spots get filled with a cementitious patch or self-leveling compound. Trowel marks, old adhesive ridges and paint drips all count as high spots.

Moisture gets measured, not guessed. A calcium chloride test or a relative humidity probe set into the slab gives you a number, and that number decides whether the floor goes down as-is or gets a vapor barrier or a moisture-mitigation coating first.

Wood subfloors have their own list. Loose panels get screwed to the joists, swollen seams get sanded flat, and soft or stained sheathing gets cut out and replaced rather than covered over. Chase squeaks now, because the fix afterward means pulling flooring.

• Straightedge check in both directions before anything is ordered
• Grind the high spots, fill the low ones
• Slab moisture measured with a test, not a taped-down plastic sheet
• Fasteners re-set and soft sheathing replaced on wood subfloors

Click-lock versus glue-down

Click-lock planks lock edge to edge and float over the subfloor without fastening to it. The whole floor moves as one sheet, which is why it needs a gap at every wall. It installs quicker, it can go over most sound existing floors, and a damaged plank can be worked out and replaced. For most basements and whole-home installs, this is what we put down.

Glue-down planks bond to the subfloor with adhesive. Nothing floats, so nothing moves, and the floor feels more solid and quieter. It is the better call in a large open run with no place to break the floor, in a room that gets direct sun through south-facing glass, and anywhere heavy rolling loads cross.

The tradeoff is prep. Adhesive holds the plank against every imperfection instead of letting it bridge, so glue-down demands a flatter, cleaner subfloor and is far more work to remove later. If the slab is rough or the moisture reading is marginal, floating is the more forgiving choice.

If your existing floor is sound, flat and dry and you simply do not like the color, that is a cosmetic complaint, and a floating floor over the top of it is far cheaper than tearing out. We will tell you when the old floor can stay.

What the spec numbers actually mean

The wear layer is the clear film over the printed pattern, measured in mils, thousandths of an inch. It is the only number on the box that predicts how the floor looks in ten years, because everything below it is protected by that layer and nothing else. When the wear layer goes, the plank is done, and no refinishing exists for vinyl.

Thin wear layers belong in bedrooms and closets. Kitchens, entryways, hallways and anything with a dog or a rolling chair want the thickest wear layer you will pay for. This is the specification most worth spending on, and the one homeowners most often trade away for a thicker plank.

Overall thickness is a different thing. It governs how the floor feels and sounds, and how well it bridges minor subfloor variation. A thicker plank is more forgiving over an imperfect slab and quieter underfoot. It does not last longer if the wear layer is thin.

Rigid-core planks have a solid mineral or composite center that resists denting and stays dimensionally stable through temperature swings, which matters in an unconditioned space. Flexible planks conform to the subfloor, useful or a problem depending on how flat it is. Attached underlayment does not replace a moisture barrier on a slab.

Acclimation, gaps and transitions

Planks need to sit in their boxes, in the room they will be installed in, until they reach the temperature of that room. Most products call for a couple of days. A pallet delivered off a cold truck in January and installed the same afternoon will be one size on install day and another a week later, and the joints will show it.

The room has to be at normal living temperature during acclimation and install, and stay there afterward. That matters in a basement heated only when someone is down there, and a great deal in a three-season porch or unheated cabin. If a space swings from below freezing to seventy and back, say so before the material is ordered.

A floating floor expands and contracts as one unit, so it needs clearance at every fixed object: walls, door jambs, posts, cabinet toe kicks, the tub apron. The gap gets covered by base trim or quarter round, fastened to the wall and never to the floor. One missed spot where plank presses a jamb will lift a row mid-room.

Long runs need a break. Most manufacturers set a maximum continuous dimension before a floating floor requires an expansion joint, and doorways are the natural place for it. Transitions also handle height changes into tile or carpet, and thresholds at exterior doors keep meltwater out of the seam.