Luxury vinyl plank in Cottleville
for a main level with no doorways left

Core construction, wear layers and how a rigid plank differs from a flexible one all sit on the luxury vinyl plank pillar. What belongs here is the local half of the problem. Cottleville has 2,275 housing units, more than half of them finished during the 2010s, and that decade builds a main level as one continuous space. A floor for a space like that is one decision, made once, and lived with everywhere at once.

There is no doorway left to change materials at

In an older layout a floor could change at a threshold and nobody argued about it. Tile in the kitchen, something else in the dining room, a third thing in the living room, and the walls between them made all of that look intentional. The 2010s plan that dominates this city took those walls out, so the same three uses now share one sightline and one floor.

That is the practical reason vinyl plank comes up so often in Cottleville. It is one of the few surfaces that can stand in front of a sink, take a dining chair being dragged back twice a day, and still read as a warm floor from the far end of the living space. The question we work on at the measure is not whether it can do that. It is where the run starts, where it stops and how it meets everything on its edges.

The older Cottleville subdivisions still have places to stop

20.4 percent of the city's housing dates to the 2000s and 12.0 percent to the 1990s, and in the older Cottleville subdivisions the main level is more often broken up, with a cased opening or a step where the newer plans have nothing at all. Where those breaks exist the floor has natural places to stop, and the honest answer is sometimes that it should stop there rather than run everywhere.

So the first thing we do at a Cottleville measure is walk the level and mark where it would be reasonable to end a run. In a plan that reads as one room there may be only one such place. In a house that kept its divisions there may be four, and using them can cut the disruption of the install in half.

What comes up before the plank goes down

In this stock the existing main level floor is usually a single builder specified surface put in when the house was handed over. That is good news for the schedule, because it means one removal rather than an archaeology project, and the subfloor beneath has generally been flat and dry since it was set.

What removal costs in effort depends on what that original surface is, and that varies house to house even on the same street here. A floor that lifts cleanly and a floor that was bonded down are two different days of work, so we identify it on site rather than assuming it from the year the house was built.

Direction, and the one line the whole floor is set from

On an open level, plank direction is not a taste question that can be settled later. Every board on the level takes its angle from one starting line, and once that line is set the floor either runs with the longest sightline and the main window or it fights both for the rest of its life.

We set that line standing in the room with you, usually from the entry looking through toward the back of the house, because that is the view guests get and the one you get every time you come in. It is a five minute conversation on site and an impossible one over the phone.

The kitchen end holds all the obstacles

The living end of an open level is mostly open floor. The kitchen end is where the work is: the island and its toe kick, the run of base cabinets, the appliance line, the pantry return, and the spot where the refrigerator sits. Each of those is an edge the plank has to die into cleanly, and each one is a place where a rushed install shows.

We also look at how the floor passes the appliance line, because in a house this age those appliances will be pulled out again one day, and a floor that was cut tight around them in the first place makes that a much smaller event.

The edges of a Cottleville main level run

Even a continuous floor has boundaries, and in this housing they are predictable: the front entry, the bottom of the stair run where soft goods start, the door out to the garage, the laundry, and the wet rooms. Each of those needs a deliberate detail rather than a piece of trim chosen at the end of the job. Where the stairs are concerned, carpet in Cottleville covers what usually happens above the first tread.

What we take at the measure before quoting a Cottleville main level

• Room by room dimensions of the whole open area, taken as one shape rather than as three rooms added together
• What the existing floor is and how it is fastened down, since removal is the part that varies most here
• Flatness across the full length of the run, checked in the direction the planks will actually go
• The starting line and direction, agreed on site from the entry sightline and the main window
• Every edge the run has to end at: entry, stairs, garage door, laundry, pantry and the wet rooms
• Heights at all of those edges, plus the clearance under the interior doors and the appliance line in the kitchen

Choosing between lines with the room in front of you

Mohawk, Casabella, ProGen, Bruce, Armstrong, Audacity, Portercraft, Adleta, Engineered Floors, PureGrain, FirmFit, MetroFlor, Paramount, Nextfloor, MSI, Tarkett and National Flooring Products are all on our floor, which is more choice than anybody can sort through in one visit. The narrowing happens fast once there is a real room attached to it, and Cottleville sits close enough to the showroom, roughly twenty minutes, that taking three finalists home and standing them in the actual light is easy to do. Do that in the middle of the open area rather than in one corner, since the level is seen from several angles at once.

When we point a Cottleville main level somewhere else

Vinyl plank is not automatically the answer here. Some owners want real wood underfoot in the living space and are willing to plan around it, which is solid hardwood in Cottleville. Some want the wet rooms held in something harder, which is tile in Cottleville. Some want the upper hall in a different material entirely, which is laminate in Cottleville. The Cottleville page covers the town, the drive and the older houses that change the conversation completely.