Someone PLEASE help us get this vinyl flooring up!

[GSDog]

Hi all.

I'm in the process of renovating a house and the kitchen floor is about a 20 year old vinyl and is well and truly stuck down. I have no idea what glue they used to lay this but it's ridiculously stuck. We have spent hours at it with spades, tried heating it up with heat guns, blow torches, etc. Nothing seems to work well at all.

The only thing that briefly worked was using a hammer drill with a wide chisel bit. However, it's still incredibly difficult and is taking us hours, not to mention has blunted the chisel bit and nearly destroyed the drill. It also isn't able to get much of the glue off, which I'm guessing is very important as we're planning to lay natural slate tiles on it.

Here are some pictures (apologies for the poor quality):

Does anyone have any advice on how to get this damn floor up?

Does it matter if there is still some of the adhesive/glue left over if we tile onto it? Or does the adhesive need to be fully removed first?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Richard C]

Just good old fashioned graft I’m afraid & try not to damage the floor too much with that SDS & chisel bit.

Regarding the adhesive; it doesn’t look like it’s bitumen based (is it hard?) so unlikely to react with cement based tile adhesive but you never know & it would be good to establish exactly what type of adhesive it is if you can. You will however need to get as much of it off as possible before tiling. If the tiles are to look good, you will need to get the floor as flat as possible, particularly if your intending large format tiles. If in any doubt, it’s sometimes best to lay down a thin SLC & tile onto that.

Don’t know if you’ve done any tiling before but there are many things that can catch you out. I would advise you read the Tiling Sticky & Forum Archive posts before doing any prep work or buying tiling materials, it could prevent you making disastrous & potentially expensive mistakes. It’s important to use only quality trade tilling materials of the correct type for your tiles & tile base; cheapo own brand & DIY stuff is mostly crap.

 

[NickB_99]

Does anyone have any advice on how to get this damn floor up?

Only help I can offer is I used a 'Big Mutt' to shift the Marley tiles in my kitchen. Worked well, but may have not been so well stuck as you are experiencing.
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