LESLIE: Talking floors with James in Tennessee. How can we help?
JAMES: I have a concrete floor here which originally had linoleum on it.
TOM and LESLIE: OK.
JAMES: I removed the linoleum (INAUDIBLE) paper residue and glue residue. And I can obviously get that up with some elbow grease. But I was hoping to find somewhat easier and especially get the glue residue up because I would like to, in the future, acid stain it.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm.
JAMES: And I was wondering if you guys had any good advice for me.
TOM: Well, acid stain can have somewhat of an unpredictable result; especially when you’ve had previous chemicals on the concrete surface. So even if you are able to get most of that glue up, the porosity of the concrete surface is going to be different because you’re not going to be able to get all the glue out of the surface that’s sort of soaked into it. And Leslie, I’d be concerned about that having some sort of blotchy affects on the acid staining.
LESLIE: Well, first let’s talk about getting the glue off. There’s a lot of chemicals out there that you can put onto it; you know, glues, solvent dissolvers that they’re kind of stinky and you still are going to have to do a ton of elbow work just to get the glue up. You know, a lot of scraping. But it’ll eventually come up.
And then, acid staining. There’s actually a great website and it’s ConcreteNetwork.com; all one word. ConcreteNetwork.com. And it explains to you the process of staining concrete; acid staining; you know, what goes into it. And really most acid stains are a mixture of water, hydrochloric acid and an acid soluble metallic salt. And they all sort of work together to penetrate the surface and then react chemically with the lime and the concrete to change the color. And it might break through all of that glue and stuff that you have on there; anything that sort of is sticking on there once you get off the visible residue. So it might work. You know, and there are dyes that you can put in to get different colors. But I would say test it on an area first just to make sure it doesn’t oddly with the remnants of the glue that’s on there.
And the Concrete Network, they have a great resource there as to where you can get all the materials, inspiration photos. And even if you choose that it’s not something you want to do yourself, they can recommend a contractor.
TOM: James, thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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