Den Renovation: Removing Black Mastic Again!

Although we did the lion's share of work on our hardwood floors last summer, there was still one more room left with tile and black mastic.  We put off starting this room for a whole month, and then we had to face the facts that if we didn't do this room now, it would be a whole year before we can get to it again.  (We do a lot of work during the summer because we teach school during the academic year.)

 Here you have it: tile, black glue, and beautiful floors underneath.

 I highly recommend using a mask, eye protection, and gloves when working on something like this.

Once the tiles are removed, we were left with a room mostly covered in black mastic (it's awful stuff for many reasons).  We know from last year that some of the mastic is surface, but that some of it soaks into the wood itself.  We also knew we (meaning Mike) would need to scrape off the surface mastic with a heavy dose of mineral spirits.  Again, we highly recommend protective gear and lots of good ventilation for this process.

Thanks to the awesome guys at our Home Depot tool rental, last year I was given a pep talk that I would be able to handle using a drum sander.  So once the surface mastic was up, I went down to HD to get my drum sander and A LOT of sand paper rolls.  I started with 36 grit, which is the exact aggression this kind of situation needs and went through about 10 rolls of sandpaper before it came out looking like this.

Sanded floors, pre-poly.

After the 36 grit removes the mastic and other imperfections, I moved to a 100-120 grit to smooth out all of the wood.  In addition, I used the edger from the HD rental to work on places where the drum sander cannot reach along the walls.  Once this step is complete, the room needs a really good vacuuming and tack cloth application to remove any dust and sawdust, and then you're ready for polyurethane.

Here are the restored floors after applying poly.

After about a week of letting the floors fully dry we will be ready to put down an area rug and furniture!

If you're thinking about gluing something to your hardwood floors -- STOP!  Don't do it!  At the very least, put down a subfloor to preserve the hardwoods for any future owners or future restorations.  There was no reason this should have happened in this house, and I blame it on the stupid house trends in the 1960s.