Shaw Resilient Vinyl Flooring

Shaw is serious about luxury vinyl plank flooring. The major company’s offerings encompass the full gamut of the upper-end luxury vinyl plank market, including three different lines named DuraTru, Floorté, and Floorté Pro. You’ll find that Shaw’s luxury vinyl plank flooring lines are all at least 5 mm thick, or about 0.197 of an inch thick. Additionally, Shaw’s wear layers are a full 20 mil thick, or about 0.02 of an inch thick.

Top vs. Wear Layers

Know your layers when it comes to luxury vinyl plank flooring. Be aware of these two measurements that are often confused with each other:

• The top layer is known as the plank thickness. The plank thickness is measured in mm (one-thousandths of a meter).
• The wear layer is sandwiched between the printed design and the urethane finish. It is what determines how well the flooring will hold up over time. The wear layer is measured in mil (one-thousandth of an inch).

Armstrong Luxe Plank: Vivero

Armstrong has long been a top manufacturer of floor coverings. Its major vinyl plank line is called Luxe Plank. Along with its large selection of luxury vinyl planks—currently, 108 species replicas—Armstrong makes your purchase decision simple by splintering its products into three quality designations: Good, Better, and Best.

Most of Armstrong’s wood-style planks address safe, crowd-pleasing favorites like maple, oak, walnut, and jatoba.

Armstrong’s luxury vinyl plank flooring uses a self-stick adhesive called FasTak to join the boards, whether alone or in conjunction with a click-and-lock function. Unlike flooring adhesives of the past, FasTak is a lower-tack, pressure-sensitive adhesive that can be repositioned a number of times.

Mannington Adura Rigid Plank

Mannington’s Adura brand of luxury vinyl plank flooring is an industry mainstay. If you like tradition served up with your luxury vinyl, take a look at Adura.

Adura stands out as a cost-effective way to add quality luxury vinyl plank flooring to your home. The luxury vinyl plank flooring measures 4 inches wide by 36 inches long with a 4 mm or greater thickness. Adura’s teaks, oaks, and maples are solid, basic replica wood species that are ideal for your moderately priced kitchen remodel, living room, basement finishing, kids’ bedroom, or second bathroom.

Mannington has added Adura Rigid to its rigid-core vinyl plank selection. The line includes full planks that are 6 inches wide by 48 inches long with micro-beveled edges and comes in numerous dark, soothing colors.

While the Adura Rigid Plank series is not its largest collection, it offers about 46 different wood species replicas with complex and true-to-life embossing. Adura Rigid is adequately thick at 5 1/2 mm.

Lumber Liquidators CoreLuxe Ultra

Shaw, Armstrong, and Mannington represent the flooring industry’s old guard, but two decades ago, Lumber Liquidators became the disruptive upstart. Lumber Liquidators still markets products a bit differently and it’s that rebellious quality that brings customers into their stores. You’ll find flash sales, fall parking lot sales, grab-bag mystery products that simply go under the name “Major Brand,” and inexpensive clearance products.

Lumber Liquidators’ best house brand for luxury vinyl plank flooring is CoreLuxe Ultra 7 mm. Lumber Liquidators calls its rigid core vinyl plank engineered vinyl plank (EVP). Currently, its selection of 7 mm CoreLuxe is limited to only 14 wood species, but some of the species are head-turners, like the heavily striated Timber Wolf Pine EVP, as well as its three whitewashed, aged plank products.

Lumber Liquidators carries its major house brand, called Tranquility. The luxury vinyl plank flooring is inexpensive, offering 5 mm thickness in planks that are 7 inches wide by 48 inches long. Even the most expensive Tranquility is still half the price of Shaw and Armstrong luxury vinyl plank products.

You’ll find plenty of ultra-thin luxury vinyl plank flooring here. Lumber Liquidators carries luxury vinyl plank flooring (not EVP) that ranges to the almost unheard of thickness of 1.3 mm. While you may not want to install ultra-thin luxury vinyl flooring in the most visible rooms of your primary residence, the drastically low price may be a tempting option for fast installation in an outbuilding, rental, beach vacation house, or even as a temporary floor for an ongoing remodeling project.

Karndean Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring

Unlike the other manufacturers, Karndean is not a household name in the United States. Well-known to buyers in the United Kingdom for over four decades, Karndean has slowly been making inroads nationwide in recent years.

But Karndean wants to make one thing perfectly clear: its products are not mass-market, ultra-cheap, or boring. When you install Karndean flooring, it is assumed that you do not mind paying a bit more for luxury vinyl flooring that looks better and installs a bit differently than most other luxury vinyl plank products on the market.

Karndean offers unique wood parquet-look vinyl flooring that looks strikingly similar to the real wood product. Karndean tends to stay close to classic looks like lush oaks and maples, all in planks that are 4 1/2 mm thick or more, with 20 mil wear layers.

Its products use a method of installation unique to Karndean, called LooseLay. It doesn’t rely on click-and-lock or adhesives to join the planks. Instead, LooseLay’s planks friction-grip the floor with a heavy, soft backing. Planks butt directly against skirt boards on the perimeter and against each other. This smooth method of laying vinyl plank flooring helps you avoid those inevitable bumps and ridges that develop from planks that refuse to click or fold into place.