Tiling a painted floor

[GIBarbie]

Howdy and Yee Haw to everyone from Texas. I rent a house which is probably from the mid 70s to early 80s construction. I would like to put ceramic tile on the floor, however, the floor is painted. The Landlord and I know the paint has to come up , no doubt and the floor needs to be leveled. Here's the thing .. how to get that paint off the floor. Etching I don't think I want to do .. just not really big on the chemical disposal after the fact and there's not a lot of ventilation b/c some of the windows were not designed to open. We rented a surface grinder to grind the paint off the floor, but after literally 5 minutes or less, the paint just fuses to the stones on the grinder and does nothing but polish the floor or fuses paint to the cleaner part of the floor when you move to grind another section. I was told to rent a belt sander or drum sander with either aluminum oxide belt or industrial diamond disc. Where do you find these things. And can this be done with an angle grinder and same materials on the disc? I want to be able to get to the base boards so the thin set we have to put down to level the floors will adhere and bond.

I used the surface grinder for a day to grind down the adhesive that was used to place the old clay looking tiles which were there before and let me tell you .. I wouldn't say it's the most tiring thing I've ever done, but I wouldn't want to repeat it. It took me HOURS to remove the adhesive with this grinder .... HOURS and even with a shop vac hooked up to the outlet, it looks like Mt. St Helen's exploded in my home.

Any recommendations you could give me would be great and SO appreciated.

 

[gcol]

Hi and welcome to the forum.
It's not too clear what material your painted floor is constructed from. If you have a solid floor (concrete etc) and if the paint is sound (not flaky) then you can tile onto it with the correct adhesive. If you have floorboards, you'd be as well overboarding with plywood sheets and tiling onto that.

 

[GIBarbie]

Thanks for the welcome The floor is the concrete foundation. The paint is on there pretty good in 95% of the area . There are some areas where the pain is not solid and it is flaky , like near baseboards where I know at one point water has stayed here. The water leaks have been corrected so I'm not worried about that .

I hope this helps. So what corrective adhesives are out there ??? Is that a wise choice as opposed to etching? Can you give me pros and cons of the ways to deal with this problem . Thanks for the help in advance.

 

[gcol]

Not "corrective" adhesive, just "correct" adhesive.
I'm not sure of the adhesive types available or the terminology used Stateside, but if your painted floor is not flaking, you should be ok tiling straight onto it using a flexible powdered adhesive.
However, if you are unsure as to the integrity of the paint or its adhesion to the floor, you'd be well advised to remove it. You should be able to rent something like this http://www.hss.com/g/6421/Hand-Held-Scaler-Kit.html

 

[GIBarbie]

Thanks again for responding or shall I say "brilliant" . Looks like you might be from the UK .. I have lots of buddies from the UK .. skype is our method of communication.

Your link shows me an angle grinder .. which is what I thought we should use next .. we tried a surface grinder, but the stones were the wrong kind and the paint just melted on the stone and fused to them once it got "hot' enough.

Any idea what type of disc would work best? Diamond, carbide? Oxide?

 

[gcol]

The tool in the link is not an angle grinder, an angle grinder rotates much faster than a scaler. The hire shop will furnish you with the correct blade for your application. Are you sure you cannot just tile onto the paint?

 

[GIBarbie]

Silly numpty me not to notice this was a UK board. I'm a girl.

Thanks for the explanation on the scaler. My DNA does not include power tool recognition. LOL! YOU ROCK!! I'll let you know how it all comes out.