My parents downsized for the 4th time and their latest house has LVP. It looks nice in their house and they picked a medium brown tone, so not a trendy color. Their last 2 houses had tile and houses before that had hardwood. I built last year and installed engineered wood floors through most of the house. I kept an open mind and did take a look at LVP when doing my research, but I didn't like the look and my DH hated how they sounded when he walked on large sample areas installed in the flooring showrooms. These days you are seeing the LVP being installed in higher end homes here in FL and buyers seem to accept it just fine, specially closer to the beaches. A couple of years ago I had started seeing the ceramic core floors with a wood veneer in Los Angeles, specially for mid/high end flips.

If you have two kids close together, locking up crayons is possible. If you have one kid who is in school and a toddler, it’s not. It’s not realistic to lock up the older kid’s backpack. And it’s crazy to tell a 10-year-old she can’t have free access to crayons because her little brother will get into them. If the little brother isn’t a climber, putting crayons faithfully on the top of a 6’ bookcase could be enough, especially if he doesn’t know they’re there. If he is a climber, though, he regularly investigates every nook and cranny of the house, and he can pop a room lock with a coat hanger by 30 months, so he can wait until everyone else in the house is asleep, break into the girls’ room, and raid the crayons by the light of the nightlight. The nail polish? Daughter (6) is done with homeschooling. Doesn’t want to disturb mom, so gets her nail polish herself, defeating child lock. Is now obedient enough to do it in the kitchen. Gets distracted and leaves bottle out.. Younger sibling, 2, finds the bottle and decides it’s salon time and takes it to a bedroom so she doesn’t get caught. Spills a little, so she quickly “cleans it” with a handy sheet. My kids are clever and ACTIVE enough that they can operate locks and keys before their wisdom grows in to tell them this isn’t a good idea—before two for most of them for the baby latches and high sliding latches that are accessible if they put a box on a chair, between 2 and 3 for passageway door lock popping, and 3-4 for front door keyed entries. Every kid has The Day We Found The Baby On Top Of The Refrigerator Day. That day always happens before the kid is two. It only sometimes happens in our house. And it’s happened with up to four adults in the room with the child—they’re that fast. Oh, and then there was the time the 16-month old visited grandma and climbed onto the roof. Yeah, that was fun to hear about. Grandma and grandpa were no more than 15 feet away. They turned their backs for a second. All but one defeated all cabinet child locks by three. And that one was among those who figured out how to pry off child protective outlet covers before two—those things actually attract my kids and invite them to mess with the outlets. We started calling them the “baby wall toys” before throwing them all away. The new tamper resistant outlets are AWESOME because they don’t look like fun to a toddler. Oh, and even though I bought a smooth-slatted crib because I learned to climb out of my Jenny Lind crib at 6 months, my slowest kid learned to climb it by 16 months. My earliest kid to crawl was moving at 3 months. Earliest to walk was walking well at 6 months. We have a hardware-attached baby gate for every end of every staircase, but it’s mostly about permission and accidents—it stops them for about 6-8 months after they get mobile...if I’m lucky. We have the house alarmed not for burglars but in case someone decides to take a 2 AM stroll. We don’t allow kids under 4 to play at most other people’s houses without me there because they’re too fast for other moms. That rule was instituted after my 20-month-Old slipped out of a neighbor’s house and walked herself a quarter mile home. I arrived at the mom’s house just as they were panicking about not finding her. Mother was a strict Indian mom and was horrified and humiliated that my daughter had waited for her to turn her back and slipped out. In the chaos with the other kids, it took five minutes to notice she wasn’t there. The mother was a good mother by all measures. She watched the kids well—as well as any normal mom would watch normal kids. My hide aren’t normal. They’re really, really hard. None of these things would mess up wood floors, though. Sand and dirt—things healthy kids should really get caked in at least weekly during the summer—are more than enough. That plus dropping things (and every kid drops things), and the occasional spill, either left or “cleaned up” by someone under 5, and your lovely floor is dented, scratched, and has water damage on the edges.

The Torlys link will be spectacular...and they will NOT be as low as $3/sf. Torlys is a premium cork brand that has branched out into vinyl, etc. They don't make anything 'budget friendly'. But then again everything they do is FANTASTIC...so no wonder the vinyl floor doesn't feel like vinyl It's from Torlys. A LOW END engineered hardwood is $5/sf. And the amount of head ache that goes with it will be horrible. I would stick with laminate or vinyl in that price range. And for a good laminate you will want to look at the higher priced products = $7/sf. A low-range vinyl can be found for $3-$4/sf. I personally prefer a HIGH END laminate for $4.50/sf instead of a low-midrange vinyl for $4.50/sf.

If we could just get engineered wood and not have it ruined pretty quickly by our son then we would. (I don’t want explain the details, just that we do know what our own needs are and why.) Yes, we got samples of their bamboo flooring. Even the installer we were working with at the time said don’t do bamboo because he’d seen so many problems. I’d love to get porcelain tile but it’s so cold (and we’re on the floors so much) that we’d need the heating underlay and that’s not even remotely in our budget. It wouldn’t have to be a trade off if the LVP manufacturers didn’t make the mindless and unnecessary decisions they did! I’m hoping as more people complain about the abrasiveness then it will change (and we are definitely not the only ones at this point…Flooret even even had a case brought against them partially for the abrasiveness). At any rate many other things with the house have taken our resources over these past few years so hopefully the flooring industry will have solved these issues by the time we’re back in the market to solve our flooring troubles! Thank you for taking the time to give suggestions!