Is this flooring engineered hardwood, laminate, or LVP?
Identifying a flooring type from a tiny visible cross section under pulled-back carpet makes it nearly impossible to distinguish between engineered hardwood, laminate, and luxury vinyl plank. This lack of visible detail leaves homeowners completely stuck when they cannot figure out what material they are dealing with.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Scraping a small piece to see how the material behaves.
- 2Posting pictures on online forums to ask experienced people for identification.
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“For the life of my I cannot figure out if this is engineered hardwood, laminate, or lvp. The only visible cross section is this small section from pulling the carpet back. Help!”source ↗
“We recently had lvp laid but theres a wicked high spot in the tile. I was going to cut the high spot out and see why it was raised up, try to level it then replace it with a piece of plywood, then put new lvp on that. But if its asbestos then I dont want to go that route”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 3How to tell if wood floors in different rooms match
- 2How to tell what kind of wood is under carpeted stairs
- 14What is the fluffy stuff in my attic and is it safe?
- 3What are these stains and damage on my attic roof sheathing?
- 2How to match vinyl flooring to existing wood
- 3How to tell if floor marks are a manufacturing defect or installer error