Reclaimed parquet flooring

Hello. We have just purchased 20sq metres of reclaimed parquet flooring. They're the little blocks 23mm x 115mm probably in oak. We will do our best to get nearly all of the bitumen off the back of the blocks but my questions are:

What is the best way to lay the tiny blocks back down? We have over 8,000 to lay some how onto a concrete floor.

Do we need to put down some sort of damp proof first?

Is the self adhesive underlay (a roll of sticky back foam) any use? We have been considering using this as it would be labour saving. We plan to use Bonakemi as our finish and are concerned it may crack when we walk on it if there is movement.

Any advice would be welcome.

Sounds like you managed to purchase finger mosaic:



If they are all loose it's a lot of work to remove the bitumen as best as possible - throwing them in a freezer will make the back tar more brittle and easier to chisel off.
If there's only a stain of bitumen left, you can use F.Ball B91 (small tubs of 7.5 kg would be better in this situation). Using a notched trowel spread out small areas of adhesive to the level concrete and stick the fingers down in the pattern you want. In no time at all you will get into the rhythm

Self-adhesive underlayment for these little things will make your work harder, not easier.

Hi,

I did about 25sqm of identically sized tiles last summer and plan to do another 30sqm this summer.

Please do not underestimate how long this project will take. I spent an extremely long time sorting through the 100sqm I brought (v.cheap) to remove the tiles which had been damaged when lifted from a school hall. But by far the longest job was removing the bitumin. This part took about twice as long as laying the tiles.

My tiles are teak or a similar wood (wenge?) so may behave differently but I found the freezer did not help at all. Some of the tiles with only small amounts of bitumen were scraped clean with a sharp chisel, the rest of the tiles were scraped with a hot air gun and a paint scraper. I was not aiming to remove all bitumen (which seemed impossible) but was just trying to get the backs of the tiles flat so that they did not sit wonky and had a good gluing surface.

If your tiles are thick enough you could rent a thicknesser and remove a mm or so off the back so that they are all clean and the same thickness. My tiles were only 7mm so I could not really afford to lose the thickness.

I had concrete floor in parts of the area I parqueted but it was too uneven to produce a decent finish and was too loose to provide a decent bond in places. I plyed the whole floor to get a nice level subfloor as I had floorboards in places and concrete in others. I put a layer Sika MB Primer down on the concrete as a precaution against differential expansion between the two materials if the plywood got wet, and used sika T54 to glue the plywood to the concrete.

I then used Lecol 5500 as recommended elsewhere on this forum and had no problems at all. The glue is easy to use and given a few days makes an extremely strong bond. I have only had the floor down 7 months but have had no problems at all with loose tiles. As woodyoulike says, you will get into a rythm and laying the tiles is fairly quick, even with the tiny finger parquet tiles.

I found I could lay most of a room in a day but then would spend double the time just doing the edges of the room. I did a double tile border and so could prepare the edges on the long walls with a circular saw and guide rail. What took the longest was doing the mitred corners around door frames and stairs.

Good luck!

It'll look great but I resent the floor every time I look at it for stealing 3 months of my life!

If you use an air gun - make absolutely sure you either do this outside or have plenty of ventilation in the room!

As for Lecol5500 - no longer being produced by the manufacturer due to VOC regulations. If you manage to still purchase this product, it could be "old" and have a very short openings window (i.e dries out before you can stick the blocks to it properly).
Better alternative now is F.Ball B91

How can you resent such a floor and achievement?

WoodYouLike said:

If you use an air gun - make absolutely sure you either do this outside or have plenty of ventilation in the room!

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Very true. As much as anything else, little bits of bitumen get everywhere and so it is best to do it outside to prevent it getting all over your house. I made the error of washing some shirts with the clothes I'd been wearing when I cleaned some blocks and ended up ironing big black streaks across several shirts.

WoodYouLike said:

How can you resent such a floor and achievement?

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my comment was fairly tongue in cheek. It looks fantastic and I'm glad I did it but If I'd known how long it would take me at the beginning I would have used laminate.

nickdsjnk said:

but If I'd known how long it would take me at the beginning I would have used laminate.

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now you've lost my respect