Flooring – Tiling when some old vinyl sheet flooring is impossible to remove

flooringthinsettiletilingvinyl-flooring

When I remodel my basement bathroom and remove the old vinyl sheet flooring, I realized the current one was on top of another old one. And between the two sheet flooring layers, there is a thin layer of paper/glue that is 1/16" thick.

enter image description here

Starting from bottom up in the picture:

1 is concrete

2 is old vinyl

3 is some weird paper+glue layer

4 is the topmost vinyl

I was able to remove all 4 layer and some 3 layer but most left there on top of the concrete:

enter image description here

I took me an hour just to pry off the small portion you see on the right side in above photo.

My questions:

  1. Should I just put thinset and then tile on top of what it is now? Basically forget about removing the current 2 and 3 layer? They stick very good and I would say it is adding 1/16" – 1/8" in some spot. This option saves the most time but I don't know if I get good result. I plan to sell the house in a year or two so I may not concern about 5-10 years later.

  2. Should I install hardie backer board on the floor? I would think it may be unnecessary as it's already concrete.

  3. Should I pour some self leveling cement? I saw this a lot on TV but never done.

  4. Should I just spend 8 hours to scrape off the rest? Or is there a faster way, with probably some heat gun and large putty knife??

I am leaning toward Option 1 above right now.

Please advise.

Best Answer

I would rent a power chipper, these have a blade that vibrates back and forth that chips up tile or vinyl on concrete floors. Since a bathroom is small a hand held oscillating multi tool could also do the job and you would have a handy tool for other jobs. I do not like tile over vinyl and the places I have found it I was usually pulling the floor up because of problems with tile or grout cracking.

Related Topic