All Forum Posts by: Hamad Khan

I've used mostly SmartCore from Lowe's the last couple of years. I've used a couple of other brands but I prefer the SmartCore in terms of something that's readily available and holds up well. 

If your flooring is coming apart after a couple of years either there's a lot of deflection in the floor, the floor was extremely uneven in the first place with a lot of peaks and valleys, or the flooring was installed incorrectly (or the locking tabs were damaged before installation). You can, if you want, put a bead of glue on each plank as you install them to keep them from ever coming apart. In any case, one of the drawbacks of the LVP is that it requires a fairly even floor and the subfloor can't have a lot of deflection. The floor can be sloped - the planks don't care about that - but voids are going to create weak spots and movement in the separate planks. You can take up some of this issue by putting down a thicker underlayment, but ideally you'd correct bad areas with floor leveler before you got started. As for subfloor deflection, you need to either beef up the joist structure or add another, more solid layer of subfloor above what you have. Which you do depends on how easy it is to access, how much old flooring is still in place, need for retrimming casings, how many bad spots there are, etc. I wouldn't re-plywood an entire floor with only one minor soft spot if I could access it from the basement, but if there was deflection everywhere I'd put down a good layer of tongue & groove OSB or plywood before I started with the flooring. 

All things being equal I prefer classic laminate at least 8mm thick. The newer stuff claims a 24 hr spill resistance. In kitchens I've been using Tranquility 5mm click vinyl planks from Lumber LIquidators, it's about $2/ft on sale and pretty good. I used it in a long stairwell hallway and got separations, but it was definitely longer than the reccoemnded run length. I also find that vinyl easier to cut but much harder to lay than classic laminate. Way more wrestling with it to get each piece in, it doesn't slide in the joints like laminate, tapping is much harder, and no good install can avoid tapping.