Luxury Vinyl Plank (LVP)
Luxury Vinyl Plank (LVP) is a type of flooring that mimics the appearance of real hardwood but is made from synthetic materials. LVP is typically made up of multiple layers, including a wear layer on top that protects against scratches and stains, a printed design layer that gives the flooring its realistic appearance, and a core layer for stability and moisture resistance. LVP is a popular flooring choice due to its affordability, durability, and ease of maintenance.
It has become common knowledge that one of the best characteristics of vinyl plank is that it’s waterproof. For this reason, it is frequently installed in high moisture areas like kitchens and bathrooms. At Origin, we love this for multiple reasons. The main reason is that we love to create a look of continuity from room to room. We do this by continuing the same floor through doorways, eliminating the need for transitions. Our customers always seem to appreciate this, especially the foot draggers. For us at Origin, the ability to create this continuous flow with bump free doorways into any room has become one of the greatest selling features of LVP.
With all the different core materials that make up the luxury vinyl plank category, LVP has become quite a broad term. Let’s do a quick rundown of the main types. First, there is glue down vinyl plank which comes in different thicknesses and sizes and is the most flexible material of the vinyl planks. This floor has some pros and cons with it that generally make it more suitable for commercial installs, however it is still often used for residential. Its main asset is that in the case of a flood, you will never have to pull up the floor as water can’t really get under it, it’s glued and forms a seal to the subfloor. However, we rarely use a glue down vinyl on residential jobs because it requires a very smooth subfloor and the levelling required to avoid imperfections telegraphing through the floor often makes it less desirable. We also don’t usually recommend a glue down vinyl for do it yourself homeowners. It requires a more refined skill set on both levelling and installing.
For these reasons the vast majority of what we sell is click vinyl plank with built in underlay. We sell various thicknesses and sizes of planks with different types of cores. The 3 main vinyl plank cores on the market right now are WPC, SPC and rigid core. Without getting into too much detail on these, generally the SPC and rigid core options are thinner and more dense that the WPC. The WPC seems to be more flexible and porous than the other two making it a more forgiving floor to work with. WPC is more likely to hide imperfections in the subfloor and will mould more easily to the existing floor. However, WPC is generally slightly more expensive than the other two as it costs more to make. At Origin we offer a wide variety of each of these types of vinyl plank and you should be able to find all the specs with core type, measurements and install methods in the floor catalogue.
