LESLIE: Jean in West Virginia needs some help with a paint or a glue removal project or perhaps both. (Jean chuckles) Jean, what happened? This sounds like a mess.
JEAN: (chuckling) It is. I pulled the carpet from the front stoop and the concrete underneath is hideous. There’s dried, yellow glue; some old paint that must have been under there. I’ve been here 15 years, so I don’t know when it was put down. I can’t scrape it up. I don’t know how to get it off.
TOM: Alright, is it fairly flat?
JEAN: Oh, completely flat.
LESLIE: Well, you know Jean, if you want to try to actually remove that glue, there are several glue removal products available at any home center. The only issue is, generally, people are trying to use these in, say, a basement where they’ve had carpet glued to a concrete slab. So we never say use it inside; only because it’s a really stinky product and it’s very caustic. But since it is out of doors, the only issue is you’re going to be pouring this glue remover on and then scraping and scraping and scraping. So it can be a very tedious project but once you sort of get in the rhythm of it, it can happen; it just – you know, wear a breathing mask so you’re not breathing in all those fumes and get a good scraper, one that has a long handle, so that you can do it upright without bending over and hurting your back. Because I’ve worked on these before and it’ll take a while but you will get it off.
JEAN: Yeah, it’s about 8×20.
LESLIE: Oh, good – oh, my gosh. That’s a big one, Jean. Have you thought about – I mean is it hideous …
JEAN: Yes. (chuckles)
LESLIE: … where if you were to paint something over it, would it go away, or is it so visible?
JEAN: No, it’s visible and it’s around the edges, I guess, where they wanted it to stick the most; why it’s thicker.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm. Because there are epoxy coating compounds that you can get in a kit that are made for concrete floors. Gosh, Behr has one; QUIKRETE has one. And it’s sort of a mixture of products. There’s a – you know you mix it all together and there’s a paint and a resin combined that you put onto the flooring surface. First you clean it with another product that they had given you and then you mix in a flake; so that could sort of hide the difference of the glue. And you can go with neutral colors with a neutral flake. It doesn’t have to be so like retro-looking. But it’s very durable. You can put an anti-slip additive into it so you’d get a little bit more traction on there, especially since this does get snow and ice and …
JEAN: Yeah.
TOM: Alright, Jean. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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