Saturday, June 02, 2012

Lucky Break?

I started scraping the glue (mainly out of boredom), and it's coming off pretty easily. It's a bit hard on the hands, but in a few hours I did 1/4 of the room. The floor actually looks really good. I might not even have to sand it (other than lightly by hand).





Side by side comparison of scraped/unscraped:



What got done so far:

Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

6 comments:

  1. SherrillSunday, June 03, 2012

    Have you checked to see if the glue is water soluble?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JCSunday, June 03, 2012

      No I haven't. I currently plan to scrape off the bulk of it, but I will try to melt/dissolve the remaining thin film with some kind of chemical (water, vinegar, acetone, lacquer thinner, alcohol, etc whatever works).

      Delete
  2. RagnarSunday, June 03, 2012

    Try water! I've had great success with old carpet and linoleum adhesive using just cold water. The carpet was over wood so I just used a brush to dampen the adhesive, the linoleum was over terrazzo, so I could liberally pour water on the floor and leave it sitting for 10 minutes. Afterwards it was easy to scrape off.

    I guess this only works if you get the carpet off at all though. I once helped a friend get rid of carpet glued to chipboard over the original t&g floors and it was hopeless. We had to rip up the screwed-down chipboards using two wrecker bars and a 6-foot section of 3/4" black pipe. That pulled most screws through the chipboard and we could get them out (mostly using pliers as the slots were still full of adhesive). Unfortunately the old floor (we have no idea how old it actually might be, the house was built in 1902 but suffered extensive bomb damage, so the top floor might have been rebuilt completely in the 50s or early 60s) had huge gaps to the point of completely separating tongue and groove, so it was covered up again.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JCThursday, June 07, 2012

      I tried water with no luck. But thanks for the comment and suggestion. It's actually pretty easy to scrape off as-is.

      Delete
  3. Sarah @ { rad: renovations are dirty }Thursday, June 07, 2012

    I had similar residue in my upstairs and hot water really helped. I imagine your wrists and hands must be pretty sore after all of that scraping! ugh. I don't envy you. :P But it looks so much better. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JCThursday, June 07, 2012

      Thanks for the suggestion Sarah, but I tried water and it didn't help much. I'm actually not too sore, and it's not too hard to remove. I have about half the room done so far.

      Delete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)