Guide
SPC, engineered oak or porcelain plank: which floor for which room?
Scale Homes Design Center · Updated
The short answer
Porcelain plank for anywhere that gets properly wet: a shower, a laundry room, a mudroom. SPC for kitchens, dogs and a slab-on-grade ground floor on a tighter budget. Engineered oak for living rooms and bedrooms where you want real wood grain, and a floor you can refinish one day if the wear layer is thick enough.
The three side by side
| SPC vinyl plank | Engineered oak | Porcelain plank | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Stone-plastic core, printed wood image, clear wear layer | A layer of real oak over a cross-laid core | Fired porcelain tile in long planks |
| Water | Core doesn't swell | Wipe spills; standing water ruins it | Unaffected |
| Underfoot | Warmer and quieter than tile | Warm, real wood | Hard and cold |
| Install | Clicks together and floats | Floats or glues down | Set in mortar by a tiler |
| Refinishing | No | Yes, with a 3 mm or thicker wear layer | Not needed |
| Scratches | The wear layer takes scuffs | Wire-brushing hides small ones | Very hard to scratch |
Wet rooms
A shower floor or a laundry room that floods once in a while wants porcelain. Porcelain plank lays like a wood floor, so it can run from a kitchen into a laundry room and up a shower wall without changing product.
SPC's core doesn't swell with water, which makes it a sound choice for a kitchen. Water that gets through the joints and sits underneath is a different problem, so a leaking dishwasher still has to be found and fixed.
Slab-on-grade houses
Most DFW houses sit on a concrete slab. SPC floats over it without glue, and engineered oak can float or glue down to it. Either way the slab has to be flat, because a floating floor shows every dip beneath it and long porcelain shows every hump. Run a straightedge over it before you choose.
Wear layers, in mil and millimetres
SPC's wear layer is a clear film measured in mil; 20 mil is about half a millimetre. It takes the scuffs, and it can't be sanded.
Engineered oak's wear layer is the solid oak you walk on, measured in millimetres. At 3 mm or more it can usually be sanded and refinished down the road. At 1.2 or 2 mm it looks the same on day one and costs less, but it's meant to be recoated and eventually replaced, not sanded.
What we'd tell a friend
- Kids, dogs and a budget, on a slab: SPC through the ground floor.
- A living room and bedrooms you want to feel like wood: engineered oak with a 3 mm wear layer or more.
- A mudroom, laundry room or bathroom: porcelain plank.
- One look through the whole house: porcelain plank everywhere, or SPC everywhere with porcelain in the showers.