Luxury Vinyl Plank near you

Queensland's Standards and Tolerances Guide contains an instructive rule that is about tiles rather than vinyl, and it is worth knowing because it shows how seriously Australian practice takes sunlight on a floor. For tiled floors, intermediate control joints are required where any dimension of an internal floor not subject to sunlight exceeds 9 m, but where the internal floor is subject to sunlight the trigger drops to 6 m, with joints spaced at 4.5 m centres. External floors drop again, to 4.5 m. Sunlight alone tightens the rule by a third.

Vinyl is far more thermally active than ceramic, so the same physics bites harder. It is why a floating plank floor needs a continuous expansion gap around the whole perimeter and around every fixed object, why long runs get a break at doorways, and why manufacturers publish a maximum room dimension for a floating installation. It is also why glue-down exists: a bonded floor cannot move as a sheet, so it cannot peak.

Practically, that means the specification changes room by room in the same house. A shaded bedroom will take a floating floor without complaint. A west-facing open-plan living and dining area with glass to the floor may need the same product glued down, or a break at the change of room, or external shading added before the floor goes in. Ask which of those your contractor is proposing and why — not because floating is wrong, but because the answer tells you whether they looked at the windows.

A waterproof plank resists water passing through the board. It does not make the joints between boards a barrier, it does not seal the perimeter, and it does nothing about what happens once water is underneath. Spilled water on a sealed-looking plank floor will find a joint, travel along the underlay and sit against the skirting and the base, and in a warm Australian house that is a mould problem well before it is a flooring problem.

The building rules make the same distinction, from the other direction. The ABCB Housing Provisions set the requirements for wet areas on the floor itself rather than on the covering. The floor of a shower area must be waterproof. Outside the shower area, a concrete or fibre-cement floor must be water resistant while a timber-based floor must be waterproof, and the floor of a laundry or a WC must be water resistant. Where a floor waste is installed, the minimum continuous fall of a floor plane to the waste must be 1:80 and the maximum must be 1:50. A waterproof plank does not substitute for any of that, and it is no substitute for a properly graded and waterproofed shower.

Where that leaves a homeowner is with a sensible rule: use the plank's water resistance as insurance against accidents, not as the design. Keep sheet vinyl or tile in the shower and the wet part of a bathroom, seal the perimeter and the appliance cut-outs in a laundry or kitchen, and treat a dishwasher or fridge water line as the real risk it is.

Vinyl planks are thin and the softer ones are flexible, so they take the shape of what is underneath. A lump of dried render, a proud screw head or a ridge of old adhesive telegraphs through as a visible high point within weeks. Preparation is therefore not tidying up, it is the job: scraping, grinding, patching and then a levelling compound where the base needs it.

Queensland's guide states the principle for a new house plainly — the finish to a concrete slab is defective if it is not suitable for the documented applied finishes, naming tiles, polished concrete, carpet and sheet flooring, including set-downs where required. In other words, the base has to suit the floor that was specified for it, and if the covering is changing from carpet to plank, the base may need work that nobody has ever had to do to it before.

Moisture is the other check. A ground-floor slab is on soil, and a slow-drying or damp slab will fail an adhesive and can lift a loose-lay floor. A reading taken to the manufacturer's method, and a stated plan for what happens if it comes back high, belongs in the quote. So does the acclimatisation period, which for vinyl is about temperature rather than humidity — the boards need to reach the room's temperature before they are locked together at that length.

Vinyl plank is sold with more marketing language than almost any other floor, and that language has legal weight. The ACCC sets out the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law: goods must be of acceptable quality and fit for any purpose the seller said they were fit for, and services must be carried out with acceptable care and skill and be fit for any stated purpose. A board sold to you as suitable for a sunlit open-plan living area floated at that length has been described in a way that has to hold up.

So write the description down. Product name and range, wear layer thickness, fixing method, underlay, the longest unbroken run in the house, whether the room is in direct sun and what the manufacturer's installation instructions say about that room, and the preparation and moisture testing allowed for. If the installer is departing from the manufacturer's instructions in any respect, get the reason in writing, because departing from them is usually what voids the product warranty.

Use LokalMatch to get those quotes side by side. Give every installer the same floor plan, the same room-by-room sun exposure and the same base description, and ask each to state whether they are floating or gluing and why. On this product more than most, the cheapest quote is often the one that has not read the room.