Vinyl Plank Flooring - Review After One Year in Our Home!

all right guys today i want to take a look at a one year in review of the vinyl plank floors that we used in our house so you can see we used a glue down application this is a piece of plastic that looks like wood and we opted for it over engineered hardwood real hardwood or laminate in our house uh we're over a year into this build uh but for the sake of simplicity this is a you know a year in review in terms of how this stuff has held up to dogs kids parties cleaning stains drops you name it because i thought the world of this stuff before we put it in and i just want to update you guys on how it has actually worked out for us so let's do a bit of a tour with the final plank flooring here all right guys so first off one of the coolest things about this is that we ran it through our entire house it's continuous through our living room um the only there's a break on the stairs where it goes up to ash uh hardwood and you can see the color match actually worked out pretty good because i know some people are concerned about that uh so our entire i'm gonna flip this around you're gonna see our entire uh foyer is filled with this stuff our closets our bathrooms you name it everything is totally i'm gonna turn some lights on for you here guys everything is totally vinyl all the way upstairs all through so you get the point it gives us the ability to have that continuous look and one of the reasons that we chose vinyl tile versus hardwood i am a very big fan of the look and feel of a real hardwood and this was a big decision because this the the product we use wasn't any less expensive than a hardwood it wasn't like using a laminate but the biggest thing was that i knew i wanted that continuity of the look throughout even our upstairs bathrooms are done the same way and we didn't want to break it up tile hardwood or carpet hardwood tile we wanted that continuous look but i didn't want to have laminates or hardwoods that were prone to damage and moisture sensitivity in our kitchen and we love the way that our kitchen turned out so how did this stuff actually pan out we're one year in let's go over some of the pros and cons okay so okay so this is our pantry area and this water cooler right here once the kids found out that they could open this door or when we forget to latch this lock and they get in and every now and again it's super quiet a little too quiet for comfort and we come over here and find a big pool of water underneath this water cooler and i have yet to have a single issue with this stuff drying up sometimes we find it you know however long later hours later and there there's just not a single issue with this floor if that was a hardwood you would have bubbling at the joint see that's a joint you can't even tell that that that's a joint right there you would have had bubbling um you you have any kind of cracking chipping with laminate swelling with this there's nothing so this stuff has gotten pounded with water same thing in our kitchen uh routinely when we're unloading this dishwasher and taking dishes over to the cupboards there's water dripping all over this floor there's water getting out of the sink and onto this stuff and there is no moisture damage whatsoever because this stuff is purely plastic i'm going to show you a piece of it this is all that it is it's more or less a piece of rubber with a high definition pitcher wood underneath it and a wear layer on top and so you just can't kill this stuff with water and also one thing i want to show you is see i've got my ecobee thermostat here 55 humidity in here right now which is perfect but in the winter here our winters we're we're in uh peterborough ontario in canada and our winters get very dry and it's not unusual to go into people's houses and they've got relative humidity that's below 20 which is extremely dry when they're running hrvs and stuff and it is very common to see expansion and contraction issues in their hardwood even if it's engineered but especially if it's real wood too where the wood dries out it shrinks a lot and then in the summer it swells up it takes on so much moisture it swells and you have buckling at the joints and there's just none of that with this because this plastic doesn't take on and and relieve moisture so it doesn't shrink and expand with that moisture content so everywhere you look you don't see those issues with the joints now one word of caution i will give you is that when we were installing this product right here where this stove is i used a electric heater in the stove plug that was one of our main sources of heat going through october before we got into the real cold and that was around the same time that this flooring product was installed so i'm going to show you something this is one of the only areas where there's gapping in the boards and this was purely due to install and this is a word of caution at the time that you install this product see some of the gapping and the joints those aren't overly large you barely notice them but it's the only place there's any in the house and they're not seasonal they're all from install and it's because at the time the heater that was running right here was was pumping out you know 40 plus degrees celsius heat it was extremely hot so this area the boards around it all expanded so much when they were laid that they were so high above their their average temperature afterwards that they they shrank down and they were left with this little bit of gapping so that was my own fault as sort of the builder contractor site supervisor on this that that's a lesson learned and if you're installing it in a in a house that isn't totally acclimatized it's new build and it's near the winter make sure that you take control of your heat and get even heat throughout because the only other places we had issues were by this side door that was commonly having cords running through it there was a little spot where we had a board uh a plank slipping out there because the glue didn't bond properly i don't know if you can see that that's the subfloor the glue didn't bond properly and then there is one other area if i take you over here that we had okay so right here is a piece where one of these uh planks was has sort of popped up a little bit and what it was is because out at points we have used these registers to dry things off namely some of these pillows from the couch when we've washed them and what happens is this is a high velocity uh furnace system and it pumps out so much heat and and that register block and it heated up these planks deactivated the glue and then it popped up so these uh these planks even though they're not sensitive to moisture like a traditional wood product is they are sensitive to temperature because this the the plastic products expand and contract with the heat a lot differently than what a what a wood product would so that's some words of caution when you go to install or when you're going to maintain this product you don't want any extreme hot or extreme cold spots but other than that guys the basic stuff the water resistance amazing scratch proof amazing i got some video i'll show you of our little guys running around they're constantly dragging chairs we're pulling these chairs in and out i'll show you now there is some small scratching that happens with this stuff it's not the deep gouges like you'll get with hardwood and i'm going to see if i can find you some here some of these scratches and honestly that's the thing too is they they don't go deep so they're so hard to see you got to get the lighting on it just perfectly okay i'm going to cut because i can't find a scratch right now and that's how good it is in this lighting you can see like this this is an area where our chairs are always in and out and look at this guys what do you see right there's almost nothing visible and what it is it's just a tiny little uh scratch in that wear layer and it doesn't change the color of the product underneath it's not like when you peel back wood and you get you get past that stained top and you get into the real wood it's just not like that so see look at that that's a high traffic area and no scratches that you can see okay this is what a scratch looks like right here this little end table getting pulled in and out all the time and we can't keep the soft feet on it this is a spot so if you can see right there that's that's what a scratch looks like guys and that's it as soon as i zoom out you can't see it and even when you're looking at it if you can see it right there if i just give it a bit of a wipe it almost disappears so this stuff is definitely family-proof um i mean it's pretty future resistant in general it doesn't matter what your application is the biggest reason people didn't want to use to use this stuff is because it didn't look like real wood and honestly we've had so many people come to our house and say we love your wood um a lot of people obviously it's not to the point where unless someone's totally out of the loop people don't often mistake it for real hardwood they know it's an engineered product but people have loved it enough that time and time again they ask us what product did we use so that they can use it on their own place um so i think that that's it guys if you have any other questions or anything you want to know about this product just let me know i've got some footage about uh of the install that i can show you about the glue down application this is not a click product and actually with that one thing i will mention is just to do with the thinness of the product because it is so thin it will telegraph any issues with your floor so i'm going to show you we got a floor joist here and i don't know if you can see it in this lighting but in person you can see just slightly wherever there is um bumps coming through the floor this flooring kind of telegraphs it one for one so if your subfloor isn't perfectly flat see that you can see that right there it's like a little raised that's the joist the joist below there is raised and you can see it coming through the floor so if you don't have a perfectly flat floor um you're going to have issues putting down this thin of a product because the subfloor is not that thick either you're putting out a quarter inch mahogany to glue it to and so if you don't have a perfectly flat floor you're going to see any of the blemishes so you got to make sure this application is fit to a new build or a nice flat floor so that's it guys let me know if you have any other questions all in all we love this stuff we would use it again definitely and yeah that's it let me know if you got any questions or you want to know what product we use here take care guys

Channel: Buy Renovate Build

Views: 436,330

Rating: 4.8928442 out of 5

Keywords: diy, lip, luxury vinyl plank, hardwood, flooring, vinyl plank, glue down vinyl, construction, home building, new home, one year review, Home Depot, how to, laminate flooring, vinyl tile, durable flooring, best flooring, modern farmhouse, kitchen flooring

Id: cjIfka1mTb0

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020