Luxury Vinyl Plank in Buckeye Lake, OH

Rigid SPC cores are dense and dimensionally stable, which makes them the sensible choice over concrete slabs and in rooms that get hot in the afternoon and cool overnight. They are also the least forgiving of a wavy subfloor, because a rigid plank bridges a dip rather than following it, and a bridged dip becomes a hollow spot you can hear.

Softer cores feel warmer and quieter and hide minor subfloor variation better, at the cost of denting more easily under a heavy point load. On upper floors in older houses around Newark and Granville that trade is often the right one. On a basement slab it usually is not.

Most LVP is between four and seven millimetres thick. It does not hide anything. Every dip, every ridge at a plywood joint, every high spot in a slab reads through it, sometimes visually and always underfoot.

So the preparation is the job. We check the subfloor for flatness against the manufacturer's tolerance, and we level, fill or grind where it misses. That is the step that gets skipped on a rushed install, and it is why some vinyl floors feel hollow in patches within the first year.