LVP flooring cost per square foot in Georgia

What installed LVP usually runs per square foot

$6 to $10+ per square foot is for ordinary jobs with the plank supplied, and harder floors go past the top. It isn't a quote for your floor. Its use is checking one somebody has already given you.

How to measure the floor so the math holds

Multiply length by width for each room, then add the rooms together. Measure the floor that will actually show plank. A kitchen floor stops at the cabinet bases, and a closet counts only if plank goes in it.

• Separate rooms and open spans. One large room is one run of plank. Four small rooms joined by doorways mean more cuts, more edges and often a transition at each doorway.
• Closets, alcoves and halls. Measure each one as its own rectangle and add it in.
• Cuts. Cabinets, an island, a toilet and door casings all slow the plank down compared with open floor. They don't change the square footage, but they do change the work, which is why the multiplication can't be the whole story.
• Area measured versus area ordered. Orders run over the measured area to cover cuts and mistakes, so ask whether a per-foot number is figured on the area you measured or the area that was ordered.

Where the per-foot math runs out

The range is for plank supplied and installed. Plank prices swing too widely to back a labor rate out of it, so if you've bought your own, ask for a labor-only quote.

The subfloor is what surprises people. A soft area is a repair first, and what a soft or squeaky spot in the floor means is where to start with one. A floor over a damp crawlspace has a moisture question that comes before any plank. Three pieces of a flooring job are worth seeing on a quote as their own lines:

• Labor only, for a floor where you bought the plank. It's a different quote from an installed price.
• Subfloor prep. LVP floats, so it follows whatever is underneath. Dips get filled, high spots come down, and anything soft gets repaired before plank goes over it.
• Transition strips. The pieces at doorways and where plank meets carpet or tile. That's slow work compared with open floor.

How is laminate different from LVP?

Laminate is a printed image of wood over a fiberboard core, and fiberboard swells when water gets in at an edge. LVP is vinyl through and through, a wear layer and a printed film over a vinyl-based core, so the plank itself doesn't swell.

The two install in much the same way, which is why people shop them together. Where they differ is water, and a kitchen or a bathroom is a better place for LVP. Don't read the LVP range as a laminate price. Ask for laminate as its own number.

A floor you can lay yourself, and the ones to hand over

Click-lock LVP is one of the more forgiving floors for a homeowner. On a flat, dry subfloor in a simple room it's a fair weekend project, and the tools are a tape, a utility knife, a pull bar, a set of spacers, a tapping block and a jamb saw for the door casings.

Check the subfloor first. Lay a straightedge across it and look for daylight underneath. The install sheet that comes with the plank says how much dip it will tolerate over a given span. Leave a gap at every wall for the floor to move, hidden afterward by trim.

Hand it over when the floor is soft, uneven past what the install sheet allows, chopped into many small rooms, or broken up by cabinets and an island to cut around. If that's your floor, send the room sizes and what's down now through LVP flooring installation. A quote costs nothing.

Measure, multiply, then count

Measure the floor, then multiply the footage by each end of the range. That's your stretch to hold a quote against.

Then count what's on your floor: separate rooms, old flooring to pull up, subfloor work, doorways, and cuts around cabinets. If the baseboard is being replaced rather than reset, what baseboard installation costs covers that side.

A quote above the top of the range should be able to point at items on that count, so ask whoever quotes you to say which ones they've priced.

Questions that come with this one