Residential flooring

Residential projects ask the same technical questions as commercial ones, but the weighting changes. Traffic is lower, yet the floor meets more water — kitchens, bathrooms, mopping, spilled drinks — and the installer is often a two-person crew working in an occupied apartment with furniture in the next room. That is why click-lock SPC and LVT dominate this sector: no adhesive, no acclimatisation week, rooms back in use the same day, and a plank that can be lifted and replaced individually if a pipe leaks.

Two details decide whether a home floor stays quiet. The first is the subfloor: SPC is rigid and will bridge, not hide, small bumps, so minor levelling or a smoothing compound is worth the hour it takes. The second is the underlay: a 1–1.5 mm acoustic layer under click planks softens footstep noise for the neighbours below and makes the floor feel less hollow. In older buildings we also check moisture in ground-floor slabs before any floating installation, because trapped moisture shows up later as cupping at the joints.

Renovation is where vinyl beats every other finish. It lays over sound tiles at 8–10 mm total build-up instead of ripping the old floor out, door heights usually survive, and the whole apartment is a two-day job. For the rooms where families actually live — living rooms, bedrooms, children's rooms — we focus on wood-look LVT in 0.3–0.55 mm wear layers and rigid-core SPC in 4–5 mm; both are waterproof, phthalate-free and take the scratches of pets and chair legs without showing them.

• Typical areas: living rooms, bedrooms, children's rooms, home offices, rented apartments, renovation over existing tiles
• Usual specification: rigid-core SPC click 4–5 mm, or wood-look LVT with 0.3–0.55 mm wear layer, plus 1–1.5 mm acoustic underlay
• Renovation advantage: lays over existing tiles at 8–10 mm build-up, no glue, rooms back in use the same day
• Comfort details: acoustic underlay for neighbours below, levelling for rigid cores, moisture check on ground-floor slabs
• Health: phthalate-free plasticisers, low VOC, waterproof core for kitchens and bathrooms