Buying Advice

Buying Advice is the practical counterweight to the soapbox. It is where the opinions turn into a list you can take to a showroom, a quote you can compare, and a budget that survives contact with a real house.

The guiding idea is simple: spend money on the parts you feel, and save on the parts you photograph. A flat subfloor, a flush transition and a decent underlay are invisible in a photograph and obvious every day you live on the floor. A premium plank fitted badly is a worse purchase than a modest plank fitted properly, in every room, at every budget.

How to compare two floors

Ignore the front of the box. The useful information is on the technical data sheet, and it is usually a column of numbers:

• Wear layer thickness on vinyl and laminate: the clear film that takes the abrasion.
• Core thickness and density: how the plank behaves over a slightly uneven floor.
• Joint tolerance: how tight the locking system is likely to stay.
• Finish type and sheen: what the surface will look like in two years, not two minutes.
• Warranty exclusions: what the manufacturer actually expects to go wrong.

If a product cannot supply those, it is not a specification. It is a photograph with a price on it. There is a longer version of this argument in five flooring words that mean nothing.

How to read a quote

A flooring quote should cover the material, the underlay or adhesive, the trim and transitions, the subfloor preparation, the removal and disposal of the old floor, and the labour. If any of those are missing, they are not free. They are waiting for you later.

Ask for the waste allowance in writing, and ask what happens if the subfloor needs work once the old floor is up. The answer to the second question tells you more about the installer than the first.

How to spend a fixed budget

The order is always the same: preparation first, material second, decoration last. Preparation protects every other line item. Material sets the tone. Decoration is the rug, the mats and the felt pads, and it can wait a month.

There is a full worked example in what I would do with a $5,000 flooring budget, including the percentages I would use and the contingency that everyone pretends they will not need.

What this room will not do

It will not tell you a product is the best one, because there is no best one without a room, a budget and a household. It will not invent prices, and it will not pretend a rating is a measurement. What it will do is give you the questions that make a salesperson’s job harder and your decision easier.

If you have a quote you cannot decode, send it in and it may become an article. Remove the company name first; the argument is about the line items, not the business.