Flooring

This may be the component that has the greatest impact on how your home interior will look like.

Let's have a look at the options available today:

Hardwood: This one is what you think all flooring is about. 100% wood that can be sanded and refinished again and again. While that may sound like quite convenient, learning about the sand/refinish costs may change your idea. If you have kids, pets or a spouse that will mind the scratches in the flooring, this is not an option; it will be scratched very easily.

Engineered hardwood: this one has some limited sandable and refinishable surface. Harder than hardwood floor. Still not good for families with kids or spouses that can't handle scratched floors.

LVP (Luxury Vinyl Plank): This came to the rescue when we decided that we need both scratch resistant and good looking floors. Although they have wide range of options  for LVPs in Home Depot and Lowe's their thickness got me thinking.

I searched more on this more, and found out people were complaining about LVP floors' clicking while walking on them and also bulging when exposed to sun. But it turns out this was the case with some common LVPs sold in hardware stores. So going with a sub-par flooring was a no-go.

I read a lot good reviews about COREtec  brand LVPs and one pattern pick our attention at a local flooring company: COREtec Plus HD Olympus Contempo Oak. The great thing about this brand is that it is thick, wide and long. No clicking and bulging ever. The HD word possibly stands for high-density, truly indicating the very realistic look of wood pattern.

After learning about its water-proofness, I was skeptic about that at first. So did not change our tile floor plan for the bathrooms. But once we started looking for bathroom tiles and thinking about the transition from LVP on dry area to tile (wet area), I decided to reconsider this water-proofness of LVP. I gave a call to flooring company to find about the additional cost of including the wet areas. The response was comforting; no additional cost! How about precision cutting around toilet and round structures. Couple pictures proved that in fact they are more malleable than the tile.

Now it was time to check the past conversation to find out how much bathroom contractor was charging for the floors. It was $2.5k for one guest bathroom. Considering I have 3 bathrooms savings were a little fortune! And what I got was continuous, good looking, water-proof and scratch resistant floors. Highly recommended! No need to pay more to have an interrupted look and feel on wet and dry areas.

While the LVP helps you achieve a continuous look in the interior, don't push it for the stairs. The inexperienced sales rep. from a flooring company may mislead you until you meet the folks doing the real job. After a significant delay in my renovation schedule, the option was going with the closest color tone of finishing for the stairs and adding carpet to blend it better and feel more comfortable walking on it.