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Remove Tar Paper from Wood Floor
I own a two-story building in a small Kansas town, with a tenant (art gallery) in the first floor commercial space. Upstairs in the unoccupied residential space, asbestos-laden floor tiles were successfully and properly removed, but tar paper was left behind. I'm looking for an "easy" and "safe" way to remove the tar paper from the floor without making the downstairs tenants run away from the fumes. I'll leave it up to the forum to define "easy" and "safe" in this context. The tar paper is in about half of the floor (total: 1300 sq ft).
Tags: Floor, paper, removal, tar
Views: 1138
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Susan on -
Have you tried very hot water? I accidentially knocked over a bucket of hot water in my kitchen when we were trying to get the black stuff up that was left under the last layer of flooring. I was not sure what it was, but it looked like tar paper. The water melted it and I washed it up with a wet rag. Susan
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Permalink Reply by Swede on -
That's a good idea, but I wonder if the hot water would leak through the floorboards, past the floor joists and into the ceiling of my downstairs tenant. Thanks though.
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Permalink Reply by Jeff & Sue Ellen Smith on -
The picture looks like it is the adhesive. I have removed tar paper by getting a putty knife between the paper and the floor and scraping. I have also had hard black goop (Technical Term) that was really difficult to get off. I ended up using a floor sander to cut through it, and scraping by hand in the corners and such. It took a lot of paper because it clogged pretty fast. I tried various chemicals and it turned into wet black goop that smeared around. Good luck
Jeff
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Permalink Reply by Daniel C. Hiebert on -
Wet rags, aluminum foil. and iron to heat. This will soften tar paper making it easer to scrape. Repete to remove remaning tar paper and glue.
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Permalink Reply by Glen Dettman on -
citrus degreaser will cut that goo...and it will smell like you've opened an orange stand!
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Permalink Reply by ruth miller on -
We had the black stuff left from the 1960's tile, in the kitchen. We tried lots of ways to remove it. We finally called several friends to help us scrape and sand that crap off the floor. It was an awful mess, lots of man hours, but we finally got it off.
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Permalink Reply by Kim Meldahl on -
We recently removed tar paper from some wood strip flooring by first using a heat gun to soften the tar paper, pulling/scraping up as much as we could, and then dissolving the remaining gunk with paint stripper (which liquefied it pretty quickly). I'm not sure that this qualifies as "safe" or "easy", but it worked. Make sure to wear proper protective gear, such as gloves, work carefully, and keep the work area well ventilated. Good luck!
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Permalink Reply by Michael Cunningham on -
You're probably finished by now, but Kim Meldahl has the correct approach - hit it with a heat gun and scrape what's left while it's still warm. Exercise care to not scorch the floor. It will be sandable ater that. This tar paper will surely contain PCBs, so dispose properly.
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