Even though we enlisted the help of our friend Tricia, the evil linoleum looked like it was going to get the better of us.
Lucky for us, the people who laid the linoleum 20+ years ago must have just as lazy as the people who put carpet over the linoleum 10 years later -- because they didn't bother to glue down most of the center of the room. So we managed to rip that away, which left us with just the border. All the scraping in the world wasn't going to pull this up. So we decided to call it quits until we could make a run to Home Depot for reinforcements in the form of adhesive remover.
A 45-minute trip to Home Depot turned into a week of taking care of other projects around the house. By the time we got back to working in the dining room, it was late on Sunday afternoon, 4/8. We doused the floor with the adhesive remover. Based on the smell we figured it would eat through all the linoleum glue in no time.
Three coats of adhesive remover later, the majority of the border was still stuck to the floor. So we ran off to Home Depot for another round of reinforcements. This time, we came back with a 4-ft floor scraper (the kind they use to remove tile floors).
After another heavy dose of adhesive remover, we put the floor scraper to work. And, with a lot of pushing (and maybe a little swearing), the linoleum glue finally started coming off the floor.
One more dose of adhesive remover finally reduced the leftover glue to a puddle of brown goo that Mr. Clean was nice enough to take care of for us. Final tally: 6 days, 3 people, 2 bottles of adhesive remover, 5 coats of chemicals, 1 industrial floor scraper and half a bottle of Mr. Clean. The final result: No more nasty pink carpet in the dining room with three days to spare before the workers come in to refinish all our floors.
No comments:
Post a Comment