Vinyl flooring removal tips??

[John Hemenway]

Thought there was hardwood flooring under the carpet, turns out there was '60s yellow/orange vinyl sheet goods. :mad:

Gotta get it OFF!!

Any tips/hints? And no moving out of the house is not considered a tip! :D

[Tony Falotico]

Hey John, I pulled up the early 1990's vinyl roll material in the kitchen just before Christmas. It was glued very well to the concrete slab. I got a large stiff scraper "on a stick" and peeled the upper layer off (it separated leaving a paper thin layer and the glue. Then I went to the borg and got the biggest heat gun they had, a scraper and a pack of 100 single edge razor blades. Took an entire day, but once heated it came up clean. Went through most of the blades, they broke easily and didn't last very long. I tried a putty knife, it did not work as well as the razor blades.

It was slow, tedious and aggravating, but it worked.............

Good Luck !!

[John D Watson]

Hey John, I agree with Tony, a little heat, a sharp scraper and alot of patience will get it off. I have had good luck with a sharpened 4" putty knife. When enough heat is applied most old glues come up pretty well and if that does'nt work try the BORG's floor glue remover. Most of all have fun and vent those fumes.

[Dev Emch]

Who ever invented this material should simply be shot in a fireing squad.:mad: This stuff is down right nasty! Last Feb., I had one of my personal kitchen projects get flooded when the heating system circulation pumps failed. Now I am a believer in NASA-izing the system with a back up circulator pump. When I installed the hardwood floor, the floor supplier simply told me to lay down the felt vapor barrier (you mean tar paper right? Yup.) and nail the floor down. So I did. Things worked out great for a couple of years until last Feb.

Last week I pulled the stuff out. In fact, some of this stuff is still on my truck as we speak waiting to go to the dump.... ummm, I mean the refuse disposal facility. These guys dont like the use of the word dump.

At any rate, when I got to the subfloor, it was still damp and wet and the integrity of the subfloor was in question. So inorder to remove not one but TWO layers of vinyl flooring, I just set my old porter cable circ to 3/4 inch depth and began driving around the perimeter of the room space and then once in the middle and then every so often from side to side. One 20 pound hammer, a crow bar and some sweat and a hour or so later, the subfloor, vinly flooring and that awful floor cement was all in the back of my truck.

Fact is, the cost of subfloor is actually cheap when you consider the work and effort involved in getting the old floor up and cleaning out that old cement. And new 3/4 inch ply subfloor really works well. During the install, you can actually level it out quite nice saving you lots of hassle later on. Hardwood flooring does not like uneven subflooring. If you use very level subfloor to begin with and a good quality flooring such that run by Timbec Mills in Canada, you can litterally finish the floor off with a festool sander in a jiffy!

If the floor is concrete, that is another story. Here I have used floor adhesive remover to aide in the process. You will still need a floor scraper and lots of elbow grease. The floor scraper is a special tool for removing flooring and tiles from concrete. Also bear in mind that some concrete flooring products made during the 50s and 60s may contain that ASSB stuff so be careful here. You may need to hire a removal team should that be the case.

Personally I dont like to glue flooring to concrete slabs. I know its done but its complicated. Often you will need to perform a moisture test and then that is not always conclusive. Sometimes you have moisture only during the spring when the snow melts. Sometimes you have moisture in only one area. Then you have cracks and movement which can crack a porcelin floor tile. If your going to lay down floor tile on concrete, you should lay down a flooring subfloor first. This stuff is a plastic like material that is often orange in color and acts as vapor and movement barrier for laying down tiles and natual stone flooring products like travertine.

And if your laying down a wood floor over concrete and esp. if its sub grade, try to go for an engineered floor which actually floats. No point in tempting fate here.


Best of luck...

[Jesse Cloud]

Any way you do it, this is going to be a messy, disgusting job. The commercial flooring installers usually just staple thin sheets of hardboard on top of the vinyl and then apply whatever flooring they want.

I've done a couple of floors with the scraper/heat gun process and I don't ever want to do that again!

Good luck!

[Jamie Buxton]

What's your vinyl glued to? In my area, generally vinyl gets glued to an underlayment. The underlayment is nailed or stapled to the subfloor. The underlayment in recent homes is particle board, and in older homes is plywood. It is often 1/4" thick, but sometimes it is thicker. One way to remove the vinyl is to take out the underlayment at the same time. Set your skilsaw to a depth which cuts through the vinyl and the underlayment. Cut the vinyl+underlayment into long strips and pull them up. Use a cheap framing blade and eye protection; you'll occasionally be hitting nails. After you get the underlayment up, there may be nails still sticking up. Pound those in or pull them out.

[Bob Wingard]

I picked up a couple of used irons (clothes type) at a yard sale for a buck each .. .. then I took a blade from a heavy-duty scraper and brazed it to a shank from a chisel used in an air chisel. Heated up the irons to MAX, then leap-frogged them over each other as the adhesive below softened and used the modified air chisel to lift the crud from the floor. Got it all up without damaging the plywood at all .. .. .. BTW .. .. .. I slightly rounded the corners of the chisel to keep them from digging in.

[Floyd Rogers]

John,

My floor was 12" square vinyl glued (and stapeled?) to the hardwood floor. I used a large flat nose shovel to get most of it. The sturdy kind not a snow shovel. Then went back with a sturdy putty blade. Got the flooring up but not the glue. LOML wanted to install the floating flooring so I did not have to remove the glue. Come to think about it, I could have saved myself a weekend of work and just installed over the vinyl.:confused:

Floyd

[Per Swenson]

Hello All,

Now for something completely different.
If you can't remove the 1/4 subfloor with the lino,
(because there isn't one). and you are dealing with that black glue
manufactered back when glue was GLUE. And heat only makes it worse.
We have gone the opposite route. This works for all types of tile
ceramic to asphault, but with sheet goods you need to remove the top layer.

Get a block of dry ice, make that a couple, its cheap.
When you freeze it , the stuff pops right of the floor
due to the dramatic temp change.
Most important no icky mess.
Good luck.

Per

[Phil Maddox]

I have to be an alarmist but the glue used in this era contained asbestos. If it is not "friable" it should be okay to remove, if it is "friable" you have a bit an issue. Friable is basically brittle material that may become airborne.

[Jim DeLaney]

Your vinyl flooring may be glued to a plywood underlayment - usually ¼" plywood - which in turn will be nailed/stapled to the floor (or subfloor).

I just replaced a (thankfully) small piece in a bathroom. It was glued to a sheet of ¼" luaun plywood, which was stapled to the subfloor with - literally - a thousand 18 gauge 1" staples. A staple every four inches throughout the field. Took quite a while to get all that cleaned up - especially when about a quarter of the staples pulled through the plywood and had to be individually pulled out with pliers. Much Fun!

Hope you have better luck...

[John Hemenway]

Thanks for the replys, guys!

The flooring seems to be glued directly to the sub-floor (5/8 in. ply). I've tried a scraper device (long handle, blade facing forward and flat to the floor). It works but is a LOT of work! :(

Dev, we have considered removing the sub-floor and might end up doing that.

The local rental place has a machine that seems to be the power version of my neander tool. It holds a blade that looks a lot like a cabinet scraper (perhaps thicker). They will let me try it and if it doesn't work out they won't charge for it. This might be too good a deal to pass up. Anyone tried this?

I don't have a heat gun but will try a hair drier on a small section this week. The old iron seems workable also.

Once I get the top layer off, the paper and glue seem to loosen with water so I'm also going to try scoring the surface and apply water.

But first I need to recover from the kitchen cabinet removal I did last weekend. (stealth 'creeker weekend accomplishment')

-popin Advil like candy...
John