Asbestos Tile and Cutback Adhesive Part 2

Ok well I was apparently too ambitious on this one. The cutback residue on the wood floors is impossible to remove without hiring someone with an industrial sander to grind it off. Since the thicknesses vary, this can and will create a totally uneven floor surface and could have sanded the floor so thin it would have caused damage. Sometimes people can steam the floor to remove the cutback, but it is laid on so thick, this option will not work for my floors. 

Furthermore, there is no transition between the kitchen and the dining room. It looks almost like they did the kitchen last and laid the wood floor separate from the rest of the house. It is the same wood and it is level, but it is totally choppy where the kitchen meets the dining room. My only option now is to have new sub floor put down and install my funky, vintage salvage yard tile over that. I am sure it will turn out just fine :)

Added note: Well, poo. LOL! When the old floor was removed and the new sub floor was laid, it actually covered more surface area than the old floor. Let me explain: The old floor ended about 2 inches from the cabinetry closest to the dining room. (None of the rooms in my house are even or even perfectly square, but I will get to that in a minute). The carpet in the dining room had to be pulled back to make enough room to lay the sub floor. My friend who did this work laid the sub floor so that it met up with the actual CORNER of the kitchen - where in reality the original floor should have ended in the first place. 

Now, back to the rooms not being even - when the house was built the only thing I can think is that the layout was either totally different from its present state, or the person who built it did not really know what they were doing. In my dining room, there is a double window - a double window that is not centered in the dining room. It actually encroaches into the kitchen making it very visually awkward. Not only is the window not center, but the wall that separates the house (in the kitchen) is not lined up with either the edge of the window OR the cabinets.

Back to the floor "oops" I made - since the sub floor now looks more proper it did make the surface area I need to cover larger. Sooooo, I do not have enough of my vintage tile. I was about 6 tiles short (you have got to be kidding me). I knew there would be no more of this tile because I bought all the pieces they had at the salvage yard. So, I went back this weekend to try and find something to salvage this whole project. I found tile that was the same thickness, but not even close to the same color - or even the same size. The tile I bought originally is 16X16 and the new tile I found is 12X12. So, now I had to come up with how I could make this work. The only thing I could think is that I could make a border around the whole kitchen in the new tile and use the old tile to fill in the middle.

This will either look totally cool and unique or completely stupid. I am SO UPSET that the pictures I took of the original floor and the demo were accidentally deleted from my camera. I will try and update this with pictures of the new sub floor and tile soon.   

Vintage Asbestos Tile & Cutback Adhesive

Ohhhh man what a nightmare! One day I decided that I hated the heinous 1980's faux brick beige sheet linoleum that was on the floor in my kitchen. I went to a salvage store and I found some large 16X16 squares of vintage school floor tile that I thought would look groovy and much better than the nasty old stuff that was currently on the floor. I (for whatever reason) assumed that the sheet linoleum that was vinyl was the only thing adhered to the floor and that there was probably sub floor beneath it. Welll....yea, that was not the case at all.

My house was once my grandmothers house and she was a heavy smoker which was why I really wanted the linoleum gone. The vinyl layer was actually very easy to pry up because it had become quite brittle with age and nicotine permeation - it had after all been on the floor for probably 30 years. However, the vinyl was laid over the COOLEST 1950's vinyl that sadly was too damaged by the other vinyl adhesive to keep. This vinyl was gray speckled with gold which is very similar to the tile I found at the salvage yard but without the gold. This tile was also a vinyl, but it had a paper backing on it that was adhered to yet ANOTHER layer of flooring. Once I saw the paper backing I knew it had asbestos in it. What a lot of people do not know is that asbestos was put in just about everything because it was a great binding agent and it was fire retardant. Now we know its a cancer causing agent and you should wet it down and/or have it professionally removed because you can inhale the particles.

Well, I was about half way through  the removal of the first two layers of flooring before I thought to myself "hum, I should probably wear a mask". Anyway, with the mask now on I removed the rest of the two top layers of flooring. This is where the problems began. 

The first layer of flooring was really thick green marbled asbestos tile. This was adhered to the floor with this black, goopy, sticky tar that I found out is called Cutback and it was used in the 1930's to lay down asbestos tile. This stuff is almost impossible to remove. Luckily, the area in front of the sink and around where the appliances were the tile and cutback came up together relatively easy. The center of the floor was another story. The cutback was laid down about 1/4 of an inch thick. I read on another blog that a lady rented and used a wallpaper steamer to remove her asbestos tile and cutback, but knowing it would take a few weeks of intermittent work it did not seem practical to rent a steamer. So, my mother remembered that she had a heat gun at the house and we started melting the tile and the cutback to get it off the floor. 

If the floor had been sub floor I would have just said forget it and put another layer of sub floor over the mess and tiled over it with my new groovy tile...but...Under all that tile mess are hardwood floors that are the same as the rest of the house and they are in perfect condition. So, now I feel compelled to save the old hardwoods and refinish them, which means I need to get ALL the old tile up and get as much cutback off the floor as possible. I took some pictures that I will post later, but as of now we are just about done removing the old cutback....To be continued...