About a year ago, I prepared my concrete floors to be covered first with an overlay and then stained. My situation was a bit different, but I bet the prep needs to be about the same. You can read my blog post about the preparation we did on lauramakes.com.
For your situation, you will want to use a floor scraper to remove anything loose on the floor, like paint chips and the glue, or you won't get your paint or overlay to stick well. I found that wetting down the floor made the scraping go much faster.
You will definitely need to get the carpet glue up. I was interested in non-toxic products, so I looked into two soy based strippers. I tested Soy It, and it definitely worked for paint and is supposedly good for adhesives too.
After you get up the glue, you will need to take care of the grease stains. If you don't, it may show through your paint. The Eco Safety Products support person recommended that we use a floor buffer that you can rent to clean the floor first with orange degreaser and then water. Our grease stains didn't come completely out, but I don't think we found a heavy enough buffer to rent.
I can't really answer much about etching because I decided early on that the process was too toxic for us because we would be living in the house with our pets at the same time as we were prepping the floors.
Anyhow, I hope that helps a bit and let me know if I can elaborate on anything.
The main problem you will have is thickness, thin concrete tends to crack. Your laminate flooring is all of 1/2 inches thick most likely, so the maximum your concrete floor could be is that much, and that's not enough. Other problems are:
- unless you are pouring on slab the flexing of your floor will cause the concrete to crack
- unless you are pouring on slab the concrete will drop between the floorboards
- unless you are pouring on slab the floor will probably not be designed to take the weight and could lead to structural problems
- Creating polished concrete requires special materials and repeated sanding with ever finer diamond wheels, equipment which would be very expensive even to rent, presuming you can rent it
I'm not saying it's impossible, if you're on slab you might be ok, but if it were me I'd be considering a cool looking tile rather than polished concrete.
Best Answer
Place carpet in dumpster.
Install new carpet.
Or something other than carpet where you have been prone to dropping food on it - sheet vinyl or some other easily cleaned surface.
A carpet cleaning machine may or may not work on any given stain, thus, this is the only sure-fire way.