From Belinda Carr.
Luxury vinyl flooring has become the most popular choice for homeowners and has quickly taken over the flooring industry. I fell for these claims and installed luxury vinyl planks in my home a year ago. It was one of the WORST decisions I’ve made in my home remodeling experience. Several planks are buckling, seams are broken and bulging and the top veneer is peeling off.
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Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:58 Luxury Vinyl Flooring
1:46 How it’s made
2:26 Why LVP LVT is so popular
4:03 My experience
5:12 Mistakes to avoid
7:03 Sponsor
7:42 Alternatives
8:33 Conclusion
Why Luxury Vinyl Plank and Luxury Vinyl Tile has gotten so popular.
1 – Pandemic: Residential remodelers, like myself and many of you, account for over 50% of the total US flooring demand. Since the 2020 pandemic, home renovation projects have surged including replacing large expanses of old, dusty carpet in older homes with hard surface flooring.
2 – affordability: While this is marketed as “luxury” planks, it’s actually one of the cheapest products available. Besides its low raw cost, LVP is also DIY-friendly, eliminating the need to hire contractors. With just a few simple tools and a YouTube instructional video you can revamp the entire flooring in your home by yourself.
3 – Influence of social media trends. We’re constantly bombarded with ads across all social media platforms telling us to feel dissatisfied with our dated gray flooring, laminate and tile.
4 – LVP is also very easy to clean. While the long fibers of carpet can collect dust easily, vinyl flooring can be kept dust-free with a vacuum, and damp mop. LVP is also waterproof, making it suitable for areas prone to moisture like kitchens, bathrooms, basements and laundry rooms.
I chose to buy and install luxury vinyl flooring for all those reasons. We bought this fixer-upper home in 2021 and decided to tackle all the remodeling work ourselves. This included replacing the old, stained carpet and the orange laminate flooring with luxury vinyl planks.
While I believed it would be durable and easy to maintain, it completely failed in this regard. Just a few months in, the floor started buckling, developed hollow spots, and the weight of chairs caused the seams to split, which was unacceptable. The veneer bubbled on the short ends of the planks and the top PVC layer has begun peeling off.
I followed all the installation instructions including leaving a 1/4” expansion gap around the perimeter of each room. In my opinion, the vinyl has expanded and contracted more than laminate MDF flooring I’ve used in the past. There has been a significant movement in the flooring between summer and winter. I call BS on the supposed durability and ease of maintenance of LVP.
In my opinion, LVP is not going to last you a long time. This is essentially cheap, disposable, plastic flooring. The thin, flexible planks you see people installing on social media are only meant to last 3 years of light use. Thicker planks may last you around 5 years. At the end of their lives, this flooring is heading straight to the landfill. While pure vinyl can theoretically be melted down or turned into chips, these are hybrids. The underlayment would need to be stripped off and the Stone Plastic Composite would need to be separated from the top vinyl layer. I would not consider this to be eco-friendly.
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#diy #luxuryvinylplank #flooring #remodel #sustainability #scam
