Posted: Mar 21, 2016 8:21 pm
Well, okay. We didn't plan to lay tile right away, but the downstairs had the most attractive (read least un-attractive) carpet and we coveted it for our Master Bedroom. So we pulled it up and cut it to fit and put the old carpet from the bedroom out to be collected.
Under the downstairs carpet and pads were nasty olde-tyme seventies linoleum tile with some kind of permanently-bonded and hideous and possibly toxic glue on top, which I presume was there to hold the carpet pads down, but it didn't. Under the seventies tile was black mastic, under which is the concrete subfloor. Some sources stated that you can lay ceramic tile on top of linoleum tile as long as there's cement underneath, and old black mastic often contains asbestos, so I wanted to leave it alone, plus I'm lazy, so I decided to give it a shot. I tried out a couple of test patches of mortar on top of the glue and on top of exposed linoleum tile to verify that it would stick. It stuck pretty well to both surfaces, so I gave up my futile efforts to scrape the glue off the tiles and decided to clean the surfaces really well and bury them for the good of humanity.
Thus ends the story of the substrate for the tile.
Under the downstairs carpet and pads were nasty olde-tyme seventies linoleum tile with some kind of permanently-bonded and hideous and possibly toxic glue on top, which I presume was there to hold the carpet pads down, but it didn't. Under the seventies tile was black mastic, under which is the concrete subfloor. Some sources stated that you can lay ceramic tile on top of linoleum tile as long as there's cement underneath, and old black mastic often contains asbestos, so I wanted to leave it alone, plus I'm lazy, so I decided to give it a shot. I tried out a couple of test patches of mortar on top of the glue and on top of exposed linoleum tile to verify that it would stick. It stuck pretty well to both surfaces, so I gave up my futile efforts to scrape the glue off the tiles and decided to clean the surfaces really well and bury them for the good of humanity.
Thus ends the story of the substrate for the tile.