Luxury Vinyl Plank Installation in Leander

What this covers

Rigid-core vinyl plank supplied and installed across Leander, Cedar Park, Liberty Hill and the rest of the northwest Austin corridor. That includes SPC and WPC construction, glue-down and floating methods, the tear-out of whatever is down now, and — the part that decides how the floor performs — the preparation of the slab underneath it.

This is the service this corridor buys more of than any other, and the reason is demographic rather than fashionable. Leander, Cedar Park, Hutto and Liberty Hill added housing between 2005 and 2024 at a rate very few places in the country matched, and almost all of it went in with builder-grade carpet through the living areas. That carpet is now fifteen to twenty years old across entire subdivisions simultaneously. Rigid-core plank is what it is being replaced with, and if you are reading this you are probably somewhere in that cycle.

Why the slab matters more than the plank

Two houses built by the same builder from the same plan, eighteen miles apart, need different flooring decisions. That is not a sales line; it is geology.

Up on the Edwards limestone — western Leander, Cedar Park, Bee Cave, Lakeway, Liberty Hill — a slab was poured over rock or cut caliche. It has essentially not moved since. If it is out of level, it was placed that way during a fast build, and a morning with a grinder corrects it permanently.

Out east on the Taylor Marl and the Blackland — Hutto, Pflugerville, Manor, eastern Round Rock — the same slab sits on highly plastic clay that swells in a wet season and shrinks in a dry one. It has moved, and it will move again. A correction there has to accommodate the next cycle rather than assume there will not be one.

That single difference changes the method, the adhesive, the expansion detail and the price. Any quote that does not mention it has not looked.

What we do before anything is ordered

Probe the slab. Relative humidity probes to ASTM F2170 go into the slab and stay there for the full 72 hours, because a probe read early reads low. You get the number in writing. Every adhesive has a published limit, and every manufacturer warranty is judged against that number if it is ever claimed.

Straightedge the floor. A ten-foot straightedge across the whole area, with every deviation outside the plank’s published tolerance written down. Most rigid-core products want somewhere around 3/16 inch in ten feet. Builder slabs in this corridor frequently do not start there.

Decide grind, fill or pour. Most floors need a combination. Grinding takes down high spots; filling and pouring handle the low ones. This is where the substrate budget goes and it is the line most competing quotes leave off, because it is invisible until someone measures.

Acclimate in the room. Not in the garage, not for an arbitrary number of days — in the space it will live in, at the temperature and humidity it will live at.

Floating or glue-down

Glue-down is firmer underfoot, quieter, and the right answer over radiant heat or across a very large open span with no natural transition. It commits you to the substrate being right, which is why the moisture reading comes first.

Floating is faster, cheaper to remove later, and genuinely the better engineering answer on a slab that moves. It needs a perimeter expansion gap held all the way round and covered by trim rather than caulk, and most manufacturers cap a continuous run before a transition is required — a limit that arrives sooner than people expect in an open-plan house.

We will tell you which one your slab argues for. Where it is a genuine toss-up, we will say that too.

The cedar season conversation

Ashe juniper pollen counts in the Hill Country between late December and February are among the highest recorded for any allergen anywhere, and a fifteen-year-old carpet is a reservoir for it. A large share of the plank installations booked here in January are booked for that reason rather than because someone disliked the carpet.

It is worth naming because it changes what you should install where. A hard surface through the living areas with carpet kept in bedrooms is usually the right balance in a Hill Country house — and that is a different recommendation from what a showroom will make when you walk in wanting one material everywhere.

What you get from us

An estimate broken into four numbers: material, labour, tear-out, and substrate preparation. The wear layer quoted in mils so you can compare our bid with anyone else’s on the number that actually predicts wear. The slab reading written down. And a straight answer about which method your floor should use, including when that answer is not the more expensive one.