I recently completed my first luxury vinyl plank (LVP) flooring installation in our cabin/lake house-themed basement. I used Golden Arowana brand “Sandalwood” that I purchased from Costco.
This tool saved me so much time. Sure, you can use a scrap piece of LVP or laminate, but this is far better. The rubber-tip mallet has some heft to it – it doesn’t feel or function like lightweight, cheap plastic.
The real gem in this kit is the pull bar. It is longer and thicker than the bars in other kits I looked at. The pull bar is what you use to join the planks together so that the locking grooves line up perfectly when you tap them down with the mallet. You can also use the pull bar to slide over rows of installed flooring if you need to adjust the space at the end of each run of planks. I was able to successfully tap an entire row over a few tenths of an inch on one side of my basement with this bar.
The manufacturer put a lot of thought into the design of the pull bar. The body is thick enough to stand up to the mallet without bending and has enough heft to get the planks moving, but is still thin enough in the right parts to slip in to tight clearances against the wall if you need to make adjustments.
The kit comes with 40 spacers, which I didn’t end up using for my project because I installed the drywall up half an inch above the basement floor to allow the flooring to expand outward (but underneath the edge of the drywall.)
