Luxury Vinyl Plank in Harbor Hills, 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.

Vinyl moves with temperature more than with humidity, which catches people out — it is not wood, so nobody expects it to move at all. A floor laid tight to the walls in a cool house in February and then baked by afternoon sun in July has nowhere to go but up.

We let the material acclimate in the room, we leave the expansion gap the manufacturer specifies at every perimeter and every fixed object, and we cover the gap with trim rather than filler. It is invisible when it is done right and impossible to fix afterwards when it is not.