Our reasons for choosing luxury vinyl plank flooring.

After years of dreaming of a home with hardwood floors, we decided it wasn’t a good idea for us.

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Whenever we made our home wishlist, hardwood floors was always at the top of my must haves in a home. I loved the idea of it, until we had some of our own. Having three dogs, the hardwood scratched. I’ve dented it by dropping things on it, and always scared to death if water was on it for any length of time… Carpet is out because I feel like it just holds in allergens and dirt no matter how often you clean. And did I mention we have three dogs? The yuck factor goes up ten fold.

An opportunity for luxury vinyl plank flooring came, and we took it!

One of the things I am most grateful for being a blogger, are the opportunities to work with brands like The Home Depot. When they approached me about installing luxury vinyl plank flooring, of course we jumped at the opportunity. We chose LifeProof Walton Oak because of all the variations in the colors and the fact that it pretty much looks just like hardwood floors. You can read all about our experience installing the luxury vinyl plank flooring in our master bedroom.

We were in love!

Needless to say, once we ditched the carpet in our master bedroom and saw how amazing the luxury vinyl plank flooring held up to our small herd of dogs, we were sold. Problem was, where we wanted to install the luxury vinyl plank flooring was covered in hardwood, with the exception of our daughters room which was carpet. For this project we decided it was best left to the professionals considering how much flooring was involved.

We did our research.

About the same time that we were debating between installing new hardwood or continuing the luxury vinyl plank flooring, this topic came up several times around me unprovoked. (Sort of like when you start looking at an object or even think about an object and it shows up in an ad on your social media feed.) Open eared and taking note, those who had installed hardwood and had experience with the luxury vinyl plank flooring, had instant regrets of choosing hardwood floors.

Those who had luxury vinyl plank flooring sang the praises of how well the flooring held up over time. That it truly was the best most durable flooring on the market next to tile, like what we chose in our bathroom renovation.

How it looks and feels

We chose the LifeProof Walton Oak luxury vinyl plank flooring out of all of the choices available because we loved all of the color variations. If you look at it from the side, you can see that actual “wood grain” even though the pattern is printed on the material. There is a white wash look I the design that gives the flooring even more dimension.

Cost

This was ultimately the thing that truly tipped the scales. We had quote several years ago for wood flooring and it was about $20,000. The quote we got for the luxury vinyl plank flooring was under $9,000. There were too many pros than cons to choose anything else. We did reduce the cost by picking up the material ourselves prior to the project.

Deciding to hire professionals

As a DIYer, it hurt to pay the money for the demo and installation. However, being realistic to the fact that we had a lot of space to cover and it was going to significantly impact our day to day, hiring a professional made sense. It also gave me a chance to focus on other things. I’ll share more about the experience of using a professional installer in another post.

Final thoughts

Deciding to do any major renovation that you hope you don’t have to do again any time soon, is a big decision. Financially alone it’s a big decision, so it’s very important to do your research and ask a lot of questions. Products and technology evolve over time and I was very pleasantly surprised by how far vinyl flooring has come since my childhood. I can already tell just from the short period of time our bedroom floor has been replaced, this decision is the best for our family.

XOXO,
Brooke