Is Click Vinyl Flooring OK in a Bathroom?

SPC stands for stone plastic composite: a rigid core made mostly of powdered limestone and PVC, with a printed wood or stone design and a clear wear layer on top. The boards click together along their edges with no glue and float on the subfloor, so a small bathroom can be floored in a day.

With no wood fibre in the core, SPC doesn't swell when it gets wet the way laminate does, and it's stiffer than flexible vinyl, so it rides over small imperfections better. The SCN boards on our bathroom flooring shelf are 6.5mm thick including the built-in underlay, come in oak, teak and grey finishes, and cost £73.71 for a 1.79 m² pack, with a 10-year warranty.

The boards are. The floor as a whole is only as good as its edges: water left standing can work through the joints and round the edge of the room onto the subfloor, where it can't dry out. So in a bathroom:

• Leave the expansion gap round the room that the fitting instructions give — the floor has to move as the room warms and cools — and seal it with flexible sanitary silicone, never grout or rigid filler.
• Run silicone wherever the floor meets the bath panel, shower tray, WC pan and pipes.
• Mop up puddles and splashes rather than leaving them to sit.
• Don't use it as a shower floor. A walk-in or wetroom floor has to be tanked and laid to a fall to the drain — see our wetroom guide.

Click flooring follows whatever is underneath it, so the base matters more than the boards:

• Flat. Run a long straight edge over it. Humps and dips of more than a few millimetres will show and strain the joints, so level them with levelling compound first; the fitting instructions give the exact tolerance.
• Dry. New concrete or screed can take weeks or months to dry. Check the instructions on whether a damp-proof membrane is needed over concrete.
• Solid. Screw down loose or squeaky floorboards, and overlay uneven boards with plywood.
• Old tiles can usually stay if they're firmly stuck and flat; fill deep grout lines so they don't show through.
• No extra underlay. The boards have underlay built in. A second soft layer underneath lets the joints flex and can break them.

Before fitting, leave the unopened packs lying flat in the room for a day or two so the boards settle to its temperature — the pack gives the time.

No. As general good practice, fit the bath, shower tray and WC pan first and lay the floor around them. A click floor floats: it moves slightly as the room warms and cools, and anything heavy fixed down on top pins it in place. A full bath or a bedded tray would hold the boards fast, and a leak would run underneath where you can't see it or seal it.

Cut the boards to leave the expansion gap round each fitting — a card template helps with the curve of a WC pan — and seal it with silicone. Drill pipe holes a little bigger than the pipe and seal round them too. A shower tray always needs a solid, level base of its own, never a floating floor.

Often, but it depends on the flooring maker's limits — usually a maximum floor surface temperature and a rule on how gradually to bring the heating up the first time. Water and electric systems can have different rules, so check the figures for the exact boards and your type of heating before you buy, and ask at the counter if they aren't on the product page.

Measure the floor in metres, multiply length by width, and take off anything you're flooring around, such as the bath or shower tray. Add 10% for cutting and offcuts, divide by 1.79 m² a pack and round up. Or let the calculator do it:

Worked example. A 2.5 x 2.0m bathroom is 5.0 m². Take off a 1700 x 700mm bath (1.19 m²) to leave 3.81 m². Add 10% and you need 4.19 m²; 4.19 ÷ 1.79 = 2.34, so buy 3 packs, which cover 5.37 m².

For an L-shaped room, split it into rectangles, work each one out and add them together. Buy all the packs at once so you're not caught short halfway across the floor.

Seal the edges with Dow 785 sanitary silicone at £8.62. Order online and collect from our Chingford counter, usually ready in about an hour, or have it delivered anywhere in Great Britain — free over £250 ex VAT, otherwise £8.34.