Luxury Vinyl Plank in Cinco Ranch, TX

The name is literal. In 1937 five Houston oil men bought roughly 4,880 acres of the old Blakely Ranch and formed the Cinco Ranch Company. For decades it stayed ranch land. In 1949 the owners sold 2,500 acres to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to enlarge Barker Reservoir, the flood-control basin that protects Houston downstream. The planned community came much later: Cinco Ranch opened in 1991 with 35 homes sold that first year, and it has since grown to 8,092 acres and roughly 15,000 homes, mostly in Fort Bend County with a slice in Harris County, all in Katy ISD.

So a Cinco Ranch flooring project almost always involves a house built sometime between the early 1990s and today, on a concrete slab, with floors the builder picked. Here is what we tend to run into, room by room.

The family room and kitchen. Builder carpet in the family room, a basic ceramic tile in the kitchen and breakfast area, and a change of material at every doorway. The most common request we get is to tie these spaces together with one continuous floor. Luxury vinyl plank does that well. It is waterproof, it floats over the slab, and it handles the busy traffic of a house with kids and dogs. Engineered hardwood is the choice when the look of real wood matters most, and it is the right kind of wood for a slab.

The stairs. In two-story homes, worn stair carpet is usually the first thing a homeowner notices. We install new stair carpet, or replace it with wood treads and nosing so the staircase matches the new floor below. When a family has wood downstairs and wants to carry it up, matching species, color and plank width matters, and we bring samples to compare against the existing floor in your own light.

The bedrooms. Plenty of families keep carpet upstairs because it is quiet and warm underfoot, and simply move up to a better carpet and pad. Others go to vinyl plank for allergies or pets. Both are reasonable; we will lay out the trade-offs honestly.

The bathrooms. Original tile is often fine but dated. When we replace it, we use a crack isolation membrane under the new tile, because Houston-area clay is expansive and slabs move as it wets and dries. Grout cracks along a line across the room are usually the slab telling you something.

There is one more Cinco Ranch reality worth being plain about. Parts of the community sit close to Barker Reservoir, and some sections, including Cinco Ranch Equestrian Village and nearby Canyon Gate, are in the reservoir's flood pool. During Harvey in 2017, water backed up behind the dam and about 10,000 private properties upstream of Addicks and Barker flooded. Muddy water from the pooling entered homes in parts of Cinco Ranch, Kelliwood and Canyon Gate, including houses that had gone more than twenty years without flooding. Fort Bend County later sued the Corps over its handling of Barker, citing homes in Canyon Gate and Cinco Ranch. If your home took water then, or sits low, we will talk through waterproof floors for the ground level and keep moisture-sensitive products upstairs. We test the slab for moisture before we install any wood-based floor, wherever you live.

The area also has a slower, quieter issue: land subsidence from groundwater pumping, which the Fort Bend Subsidence District has pushed users to cut back on. It is one more reason we prefer floating floors and flexible installation methods on Cinco Ranch slabs.

We don't run a store. We bring the samples to your house, so you can see them next to your cabinets and in the light from your own windows, without driving from store to store on a weekend. The in-home estimate is free.