Karndean
When we built this house, I wanted cork flooring in the kitchen - a bit cushiony under foot, good looking, easy to care for under the right circumstances. Trouble was, we live a long way from any cork installers, it was going to cost a fortune as they would have travel 2 hours drive each way for floor prep, floor seal, lay cork, sand cork, 5 coats of seal - travel for each of these steps. I started to look at other options, meanwhile we lived with bare concrete in the kitchen. For years. I just couldn't find anything I was happy with.
Eventually we found out about Karndean LVT and LVP. It is a very heavy product for vinyl, comfortable to walk on, and available in a huge range of pretend-stone tiles and pretend-wood planks. I took ages to find a design I was happy with, as we already had fake-wood pattern laminex on kitchen benchtops, I thought too much fake wood would look too fake, so tried to find a stone pattern I liked that suited the room - Karndean were great, extremely generous with free samples of whole planks and whole tiles, other brands offered little tiny samples that didn't give a clue how they would look on the floor. I showed them photos of the kitchen and they suggested a few designs, what won me was a limed - oak pattern, very light almost white, with a very different wood grain to our benchtops so it didn't look like a bad attempt at a match, but completely different. They even gave me several whole planks of the one pattern so I could see what it looked like in my own home over a good sized area. Free to keep, no need to return to the showroom. I couldn't find a stone pattern I liked at all, personal taste not a quality issue. They were too grey, like trying to imitate bare concrete, which was the surface I wanted to cover up... I wanted warmer browner colours, which aren't in fashion right now but I don't care a fig about that.
These products were designed to be loose lay - they just sit in place, laid to be a tight fit wall to wall. This depends on a fairly constant room temperature year round so there isn't too much expansion/contraction over the seasons. Australian homes often have much more temperature variation, it is a perverse logic in a way, but as much of the heavily populated parts of Australia have a relatively moderate climate, homes often have very basic heating/cooling in the living areas only, with unheated/uncooled utility rooms and bedrooms. This means our homes tend to have more indoor temperature variation than homes in Europe or USA that have much greater outdoor temperature variation, and so have powerful whole-house heating and cooling systems that keep a fairly stable interior temperature. This means that "looselay" products are NOT loose-laid in Australia, they are glued to the floor underneath. You get a choice of "hard glue" that bonds the vinyl product to the base floor and if you need to replace a plank or tile, you need to call in an installer; or you can have a "re-layable" glue that remains tacky, so you can lift and replace a plank as needed by yourself, but these are subject to more movement from expansion / contraction. Some installers always do one or the other, others give the customers advice and the choice. We chose hard glued as we get some west sun directly on the floor through a window.
I LOVE the product. My floor looks great, is easy to care for, I use the Karndean-branded cleaning and rejuvenating products. I have had one accident, I dropped an enamelled steel baking tray on the floor, the sharp edge of the tray made a small cut in the vinyl. It is visible but not too obvious. I have replaced the tray with one that has no sharp edges, and will live with the marked floor plank. I may try a repair product, or if in future I damage another plank, I might get new ones re-laid - I have spare planks. Did I say I love this flooring??
