National Floors Direct review: Luxury vinyl plank

We purchased our floors through NFD in March 2023 based on information from the salesman:

Low VOC product
25 year warranty
Installers were not contractors but NFD employees
NFD were flooring experts and able to address any flooring problems we had
Unfortunately most of this turned out to not be true.

First the true, thankfully the Shaw product we selected is a low VOC product. I have life threatening allergies including environmental allergies and have had little reaction to the Shaw Luxury Vinyl Plank (Whispering Woods) that we selected. That said the color we thought we were selecting and the color that was delivered and installed are very different.

See a sample of what we were sold…...
See what was delivered and installed.
As you can see from the pictures the two floors are VERY different. Disappointment in the color would be an understatement of the emotions I experience on a daily basis.

Next the questionable, we were told the product had a 25 year warranty, I don’t know if that is true or not. I have zero paperwork that states we have a warranty. Is this the normal process for your company? Is there paperwork that we should have received that states we have a 25 year warranty on our flooring? Perhaps we didn’t get the paperwork? Maybe we have it and I don’t know where to look for it?

And now the not true, as soon as the van showed up to install the flooring my husband and I both had a sinking feeling as we began to realize we had been misled. On the side of the van was the name of the contractors business and phone number. They were NOT NFD employees. Then they began unloading the materials and well you can see in the pictures it was NOT what we believed we purchased. We immediately called the sales person and customer service however due to the NFD r iron clad contract our option was to accept the flooring or pay the $17,000 and then order a different flooring color and pay for it in addition to the $17,000. Unfortunately we have financial constraints so paying well over $20,000 for flooring was not an option. So I am living with flooring that I hate, that every time I look at my floors I get angry about all over again.

Lastly we were told NFD were flooring experts and able to address any flooring problems we had, this turned out to not be true either. You will note in the picture of the flooring we thought we were getting there is a box in the right hand bottom corner. We live in a manufactured home. We knew we had a soft spot that needed addressed, the box was placed there to keep people, including the salesman, from walking on the spot. The salesman was told about and saw the soft spot, he assured us NFD was able to handle this type of repair, well apparently they aren’t.

Within a few weeks our flooring started to split on the edges. My husband called, and called, and called, and called Rich. On the rare occasion that rich answered his phone he would promise that he would come out and look at the floors. Months passed, but in July he did finally come to see the floors and immediately realized there were indeed issues. He said that he would have a guy come and “repair” the three spots that we pointed out to him. The contractor showed up in August and wow it was eye opening. The contractor looked at our flooring, removed a few panels and called Rich. Eavesdropping their conversation we were stunned at what we heard. The contractor was telling Rich that basically our entire floor had been installed incorrectly. Basically what happened is that the original contractor laid the new subfloor incorrectly and because of that the planks were moving and rubbing against each other which was/is causing the Shaw planks to split on the sides.

Two weeks later we noticed the same issue of the sides splitting again, this time in our bedroom. Again, my husband called, and called, and called and now Rich won’t even answer the call. We know this because we have called Rich from other peoples phones and he answers every time so I can only guess that this is his way of washing his hands of the mess NFD made in our home.

I’m also not sure that there wasn’t some elder abuse in our situation. I am a disabled senior citizen and I usually go to bed around 8:00 p.m. every night due to medication that I take. They continued to work on installation lllooonnngg past that time and then asked me to sign off on the job. Pretty sure that would qualify as duress if not abuse.

After they left I can’t begin to tell you the complete disarray they left my house in. I had to hire someone to come and clean up all the wood and hardware from the front yard and inside the house.
Brown tinted glue on my marble top dresser.
Plank scraps with some kind of sticky stuff on them.
Nothing was put back were it belonged.
Did I mention that nothing was cleaned up or put back?