Townsend Custom Floors installs luxury vinyl plank and milled hardwood to an eighth-inch tolerance across Cape Girardeau County.

When changing from builder-grade flat sheet vinyl to 7mm rigid-core luxury vinyl plank with attached acoustic pad, the finished floor height increased by 5/16 of an inch. Lesser operators take the shortcut of scribing and hacking the vinyl plank around door mouldings, leaving jagged gaps that collect dirt and require messy beads of quarter-round moulding wrapped around the jamb feet.

We take an offcut piece of the exact new flooring and underlayment, lay it flat on the subfloor inverted as a rigid depth guide, and use a high-carbon steel flush-cut blade on an oscillating multi-tool to undercut the bottom of every door casing and jamb. The waste block is extracted with a chisel, leaving an exact horizontal pocket. Each vinyl plank is then slid directly beneath the casing, allowing full thermal expansion and contraction while presenting a seamless, professional joint with zero exposed raw cuts.

This precision work was completed across five doorways in under three hours as part of our standard flooring installation scope. Where doors swung too close to the new floor height, we planed the bottom door rails on our mobile workshop bench to maintain 1/2-inch clearance over carpets and thresholds.

This 720-square-foot Cape Girardeau residential floor involved replacing worn-out carpet and warped parquet with solid select white oak hardwood. The homeowner wanted seamless visual continuity between the formal front living room, a central gallery hallway, and the master bedroom entrance without unsightly metal T-mouldings breaking the visual plane.

We established a true perpendicular reference baseline using cross-line lasers aligned from the exterior entryway wall. Planks were racked out across the open floor space to distribute board lengths evenly and avoid H-joints or clustering of dark mineral streaks. We blind-nailed every board tongue at 45 degrees using pneumatic cleats, switching to hand-drilled surface nails filled with color-matched wax only along the final two wall courses where the nailer body could not swing.

Around all baseboards, we installed pre-primed craftsman wood shoe moulding pinned with 18-gauge brad nails into the baseboard rather than the oak floor, allowing the timber to expand and contract across humid Missouri summers. Transitions to bathroom tile were finished with custom-rabbeted oak reducers cut on our job-site sliding miter station.

Staircases are where low-bid flooring installations fail most visibly. Wrapping stairs in cheap overlap plastic nosing creates a 3/8-inch lip that presents a serious trip hazard, flexes loose under foot traffic, and squeaks constantly. For a residential client just south of Cape Girardeau on the Scott City border, we retrofitted twelve open-stringer stair treads using commercial-grade luxury vinyl plank.

First, we cut back the existing rounded plywood subfloor bullnoses flush with the risers using our oscillating flush-cut saw, creating flat 90-degree tread-to-riser profiles. Each vinyl plank tread was scribed individually to account for out-of-square stair stringers. We installed heavy-duty architectural flush anodized aluminum stair nosing profiles, setting them with high-grab polyurethane adhesive and countersunk screws into the structural tread framing.

The vinyl plank treads were fully bonded with commercial pressure-sensitive vinyl adhesive rather than floated, ensuring zero movement or hollow sounds on the descent. Risers were trimmed in crisp white primed risers with caulked perimeters for an architectural staircase finish.