View Single Post
  #4   Report Post  
Posted to alt.home.repair
N8N N8N is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,192
Default how clean does a concrete floor need to be?

On Oct 13, 3:48*pm, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On Oct 13, 10:25*am, N8N wrote:





...to put down tile?


reason I ask this question is I spent last weekend finishing scraping
up the old tiles in my laundry room (I'd done the other half months
ago; then finally I got sick of looking at the job half done and
shoved everything to the other side of the room and finished it.)
They were the semi-flexible kind, like you'd see in, say, an old
basement, or a warehouse or something. *I used floor stripper and a
paint scraper and stiff scrub brush to get up "most" of the old
adhesive, and it worked pretty well. *Unfortunately I find that there
was no edge to the tile where it enters the big room down there, it
just continued on right underneath the threshold, so I can only assume
that the whole basement was originally tiled, and then in the other
room this nasty Berber carpet was laid over top of it.


The whole reason for this exercise is that the tiles in the laundry
room were already starting to come up by themselves, so I assume that
the ones in the main room are in similar condition, so it would
probably not be a good idea to lay anything over top of them; they'd
need to be removed. *I think that long term we would like to pull up
the carpet and then lay down new tile and use an area rug over top of
it. *Question is, if the concrete floor "looks" clean, but might have
a few spots of glue here and there, is that clean enough to
successfully lay down new tile, or does it really need to be eat-off-
it spotless? *If the latter, how does one accomplish that?


thanks,


Nate


I assume that the ones in the main room are in similar condition

That may not be the case. If the laundry floor got wet more than a few
times over the years, that might explain why the tiles are coming up.

You might not have that problem in the main room.


You're right, of course, but I can't count on that. also the tile was
painted over (!?!?!?!) seriously, it was this old school white stuff
with gold flecks and someone painted right over top of it with blue-
grey paint. Looked really awful. So I can't make any assumptions
about the main room one way or another unless/until the carpet comes
up, and I have to assume worst case, that I'll have to scrape and
scrub there as well - because I'm sure that if tiling over old tile is
half assed, then tiling over old tile that's been painted is quarter
assed at best. I do have *some* standards

nate