my house has not been redone sincve my parent bought it (the 70's i think) i really want to rip up the floors and lay wood floors and was wondering how i would get the old flooring off first. someone told me use an iron to heat the glue any other ideas
You should lay 3/4 oak over the subfloor. Using a pry bar and crowbar, rip up the underlayment and go down to the subfloor. Screw in any loose floor boards and lay rosin paper and the new oak down. Varnish and that floor will outlast any laminate by a century.
You can lay your wood floor over the vinyl tile, it makes a great moisture barrier. If you have underlayment that needs to come out before you lay your floor, cut it into manageable sections and pry it up with the tile on it. ( sometimes you need to take up the underlayment so all your floors match up.) There is usually underlayment between the tile and the sub-floor.
You need to get a scraper and scrape it up. My husband uses a tool he calls a grub bar, its a long handle with a scraper on the end of it. He gets started at one end and works his way across the floor, ripping up the vinyl or tile. Using an iron to heat the glue could take a great amount of time, considering how big your floor area is.
You can use a heat gun, heat the tile and remove with a spade. Which I don't have to tell you is a back breaking job. However, if the floor tiles are in good shape you should be able to lay a wood floor right over them. If you don't want to do that, you can always put down a new sub-flooring over tiles, then install your wood floor. Which I would recommend. You can use 1/4 luan or plywood, sub-flooring glue, drill and at least 1-1/2 deck screws to secure.
Obviously TILE is not what the flooring is composed of. Although Vinyl is advertised as such,,,,even yahoo 360 offers custome page backgrounds stated to be TILE...it just isn't. SCRAPE is how to best proceed, HEAT does nothing more than soften the GLUE and creates as much mess. Your issue might be lessened in that once scraped, the residue left attached may be minimal, and you should lay an underlayment at least,,,if not new subflooring. You may be able to RENT a heavy duty floor scraper, but HD carries a large variety of them for prices that are reasonable. Steven Wolf
