I have a 20 ft by 16 ft room, built on a concrete slab, that has its original lineolum tile floor dating back to the 1950s The tiles are 9-inch square, ugly, and –so I’ve been told–most likely contain asbestos. For both reasons I want to remove them. It looks like they were set with some kind of mastic.
Suggestions, please, on how to go about this, that are both safe and easy on the back. Do any of the tips recently posted for removing ceramic floor tiles apply here? My understanding is that solid asbestos–such as may be in these tiles–is stable. Any asbestos experts out there?
Many thanks!
Replies
Hey Brooklyn,
I just went through the exact same thing you did when I bought my last house. 1959 - 4 level split. Asbestos backed tile EVERYWHERE! I've had several different opinions offered on this stuff and even phoned into a radio show one day to ask about removing these tiles. The host of the show who's very well respected (Shell Busey) said that aslong as you aren't taking a sander to them - scraping, chipping, pulling and anything else that doesn't create fine dust will be fine.
We went about removing them in my front entrance and kitchen with a floor scraper. What a mess, and what an ugly job. The adhesive used to stick them down is something else. It's like black tar. In hind site, we should've just left them and put the sub-floor down right over top of them - would've been so much easier.
In the one utility room we had in the basement we needed a quick fix and installed some new stick down tile. Cleaned with TSP, primed with a latex floor primer and the new tiles aren't going anywhere - they are stuck for good.
For some reason when I returned the floor scraper to the Home Depot rental center, they had asked what I used it on and I told them. The lady behind the desk broke out into a cold sweat and said 'Oh my, we aren't supposed to let people use these for asbestos backed tile'. Don't know what that was about but surely you know what the advice at HD can be like.
I think the best advice would be to leave the darn things in place and go over top of them when possible. I did that with some carpet on the stairs - the installer said they are stuck down so well that I had nothing to worry about.
IMHO, I really don't think you need to worry too much and it's not as if you're slowly killing yourself and your family by having these tiles around. Hope this helps, I'm no expert but hopefully we'll hear from someone that is.
By the way, as I was paying for the floor scraper at the HD, I started coughing a lot and mentioned that I did have a really scratchy feeling in my throat since using the scraper on the floor. I also asked the lady if coughing up blood was something I should be concerned with?? Lol...then I said to her 'just joshin ya'. She didn't think it was funny.
Thanks for the reality check and helpful advice. Yes, the mastic looks like it will survive Armageddon. I've got so many different floor grades in this old house that I was hoping not to raise the floor in this room by covering over the existing tiles. But it sounds like I should reconsider.
If I read your post correctly, you did not put subflooring over the asbestos tiles in all areas?
Loved the HD story.
I wouldn't know about the sanding idea but it might cure my need for cigarettes. I scraped some of thse up last month (1600 sq. ft.) and after the first hour the sneezing, coughing, and taste in my mouth steered me to the resperator. Besides the dust that arises from the tile breakage, Lord knows what dirt, mold spores, ancient cheeto dust, or whatever exists between and below those old tiles. At least keep it wet, and wear protection. You'll never know how many partners have been on that floor.
Good point TG, I forgot to mention the respitator thing. I used an N90 type dust mask as a precaution, and yes there was lots of dust floating around. Any type of dust is bad dust to be breathing in!
A small job like this won't lead to permanent lung damage but the temporary irritation makes it worth wearing the respirator.
but for anyone doing it regularly, - a N-90 dust mask is worthless. The tiny fibres that cause damage will pass right through it. You need a N- 100 filtered .
Excellence is its own reward!
I'm just wondering - I ran into alot of dust from the scraping and chipping away. Do you think there was actually any asbestos in the dust?? Or was that most likely crud and general dust from the work? Like I said, the lady at the HD told me she wasn't supposed to have let me rent the scraper for these types of tiles...but I always take their advice with a grain of salt.
Maybe I should've borrowed one of the SCBA's from work!
Mike
You probably did inhgale a few fibres of it but not to worry.
One piece of evidence that was denied from testimony in the JM lawsuits over asbestos is the fact that those WW2 shipyard workers who handled asbestos routinely and did not smoke cigs never displayed any symptoms of asbestosis. It was only workers who regularly smoked and who routinely handled the stuff suffered lung scarring and the symptoms that go with asbestosis.
The reasonable conclusion that has been reached by the medical establishment (those unaffected by the financial repercussins and pc junk science) is that the tars and lack of oxygen from the cigs contributed grossly to the scar formation once the irritating fibres were in place in lower reaches of the lungs. Imagine some of that mastic miniaturized and placed in the lung sacs. Suppose it might get hard to breathe?
Healthy lungs in people who breathed deeply, had good nutrition, and excercise, showed no long term damage, even after long term exposure.
For a good five years, I was exposed to loose asbestos fibres myself. There was a time that we recieved 55 gal drums of loose fibre and used it on roofs, embedding it in hot tar. I was even breathing tar fumes at the time. I am over fifty years old and have twice been checked for lung function and get lung x-rays every five years. I eat and live healthy and haven't smoked since I was twenty.
No problems for me..
Excellence is its own reward!
Edited 5/15/2003 1:12:41 PM ET by piffin
I pulled up v/a tile at my last house. Kitchen/dining area/den. House is 1953-54 vintage. I took up subfloor (1x6 t&g parallel to wall, second layer of sub was running at 45 deg), along with the tile (went back with 5/4 oak over the subfloor). Also had a layer of tar paper between 2 applications of mastic. Three trailer loads of stuff to the local landfill, no problems dumping it -- and I even told the attendant and weigh station what it was, they said no problem dumping it in the construction waste area.
You close the bottom of that bottle of Merlot tonight or something?
inhgale fibres WW@ fibres
ahhhh, unless fibres is a word, I'm guessing that might be the case since it was spelled that way twice?? well its in the spell check so my mistake :)Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, Professional build the Titanic.
As was the case with Dan Quayle, in his rendition of potatoes, with an 'E' I often use archaic spellings of words, such as colours instead of colors, fibres instead of fibers, and others where the latin ot old French forms were vulgarized in American English.
In another fine example, Merlot makes men merry whilest wine merely makes them drunk.
Goodest of luck in your finals.
Excellence is its own reward!
The sincerest of thanks!
I don't need no stinkin luck, I'm a freakin genius
actually a bit worried about the old espanol tonightNever be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, Professional build the Titanic.
Hi Piffin,
I used to work at a gold mine and one of my managers had come from an asbestos mine many years before. The connection between smoking and asbestos was mentioned a few times as he had quite a few friends that had many health problems due to that lethal combination.
I think asbestos gets alot of attention and yet many people over look much more common hazards such as silica dust from glass and other sources. I work in the fire/rescue profession and we don't dare cut a windshield out of a vehicle without a steady supply of lubriaction on the recip. blade and if possible a dust mask ( or atleast that's dept. SOP's) - and that's outdoors with good ventilation.
Mike
Someonme else had a chart here showing odds of dangerous health problems that put cigarettes at several thousand times the danger level of asbestos.
In your work, the unknowns from petro-chemicals is the big one for potential nervoius system damage and lung damage.
Be careful out there and thanks for putting it on the line..
Excellence is its own reward!
Glad to be of help. We had the same elevation concerns as you in the kitchen, so we ripped up the old tile. In retrospect, we needed to put down a new substrate anyway for the thinset and ceramic tile even though many of the staff at HD told us to put the thinset directly on top of the old tile!!! Yikes! So...being smarter than that - we put down a new subfloor and probably could've lived with the extra 1/8" had we left the old tile down and went right over top of it. we gained about 3/4 in total with the new sub-floor, thinset and ceramic.
As for the other areas, we carpeted right over top of the old tiles on the stairs and hallway. The one other room where we put down a temp. cheap fix - we primed the floor with a latex primer and put some new stick down vinyl tiles right over top. The old ones are so well stuck that I wasn't worried about going over top of them.
So..to answer your question in a round about way, no we didn't put sub-floor wherever the old tile existed. I have a few other rooms to finish yet and unless I'm putting more ceramic in, I'll probably go right over top of the old stuff with whatever I chose (i.e. new hardwood, carpet, maybe even laminate Lino). If you're going to use any forms of adhesive, mastic, thinset, etc. just check to make sure it's compatible with the tile. I know they waxed the crap out of these tiles for the last 20 years.
Mike
I read with interest all the comments on removing asbestos tile. We own several older buildings with this tile and started renovations in two of them last year. We had the same concerns and questions that have been raised here. I called all of the older companies in town that I thought might have installed some of this stuff over the years,and was surprised that no one could give me any info.
This stuff appeared to be firmly attached,so I started tapping it with a good heavy hammer and it began to fly everywhere. I removed all of it in the kitchens and bathrooms this way,of course, I had to wear eye protection as it flew around like bullets. However, It went very fast and very little, if any, dust was generated,but I did wear a respirator. The black stuff was the last mystery,and I just found the answer recently. They used tar paper as an underlayment or vapor barrier when they installed the stuff, and over the years due to the heat in the house it broke down and appeard to be some sort of mastic. I found pieces in the cooler parts of the house such as the bathrooms near the walls that I could peel up in strips. Also, I just renovated my Son's kitchen (built in the 50's) and found large pieces of the tar paper under the cabinets still intact
Hope this is useful info.
Layed down some of that stuff in the '50s, and the black stuff we used was literally roofing cement straight on top of concrete, applied with typical grooved trowel, no tar paper. Still remember cleaning the edges with paint thinner and rags and steel wool.
Never have removed any.
Thanks for all your input. I have a much better sense of options. In a corner where the tiles have loosened over the decades, the tiles seem quite brittle.
FYI- A google search yielded a government site that suggested removing the tiles by 1) flooding the floor to soften the tile; 2) blowtorching the tile to soften, then "flip up like pancake." Of course, then I'd REALLY have problems... flood followed by burning the place down. :-)
The black mastic is "cut glue or cutback adhesive." Commonly used for v/a and vinyl tiles up to the mid eighties. It is not very responsive to flooding with water if the tiles stille have good adhesion. By flood, they don't mean FLOOD, but just enough water to keep the floor wet for a few hours. If any of it is going to come up, it will loosen up in that period.
The torch reccomendation works, but is slow, and as you said hazardous. I would use a good comercial grade heat gun to soften each tile and peel it up. Wear a pair of leather gloves to protect yourself form the hot tiles. The heat method, although slow, is the safest, and least likely to produce friable (airborne particles) of asbestos containing dust. Chipping. scrapping, and beating that old tile will produce friable particulates, unless you constantly mist the area you are working in.
There are strick regulations concerning the removal of asbestos containing materials. and that includes disposal. If you use any method that produces airborn dust, protect yourself, and keep your family away. Take a change of clothes with you and plastic bag to but you contaminated clothes in. Wash your contaminated clothes seperately and immediately as well as yourself. Do not needlessly expose your family to asbestos. Once it is in your lungs or thiers, it does not go away....ever. It is accumulative all your/thier life span. Do a search on asbesteosis to get a better understanding of what you are dealing with.
The material you remove is not an environmentaly hazardous. It is a health hazard that should be clearly marked as asbestos. Sanitation workers should not be needlessly expossed to something that you have taken great pains to avoid exposing yourself and your family too. There are special plastic bags available for disposal of asbestos containing products. The waste should also be double bagged. You might also call your sanitation department and ask what they require for safe disposal.
Did not mean for this to come across as a sermon. To many of us pooh pooh the asbestos hazards we have been exposed to over the years. While your risk is minimal for the size job you are undertaking, what about the next job, and the guys handling the waste? It doesn't take a lot of the stuff to produce health problems twenty or thirty years down the road.
Be safe and be healthy.
Dave
Dave,
Actually, the regs aren't strict at all for homeowners working on their own houses. The only rules are common sense and whatever rules the local authority has for disposal. That usually means double bagged and labeled.
common sense means respirator, dust collector, and get the kids out of the house for the interim, IMO.
Excellence is its own reward!
We've gone through the same thing.
One thing that seems to work great on the black stuff left behind is Sentinel 747 adhesive remover. Pour it on, scrub it in, then scrub it off.
Your are correct about the home owner removal, but my thinking is that this probably not going to be the only home he ever owns or works on. The regulations were developed to protect workers in hazadous environments.....that us a lot of the time...the remodeling contractors, builders, etc. that participated on this forum. It may also include many of the homeowner and DIY the vist this site. Many will own more than one or two homes in thier lifetime. Many more will help a friend with a project or two or three.....
I think that, as trade professionals, we should give our best advice. Turning our heads to the hazards of asbestos just because it is a DIY job, and not covered by the same regulations we must comply with, is short changing the person we are trying to help. IMHO.
dave
good reasonning especially considering the number of other people who will read this and misapply half of it.
But it is also true that asbestos fears are greatly exagerated and amplified to the point that some people think that just touching the stuff or letting their kids crawl naked on such a floor is likely to speed their demise. it is not a toxic poison as some believe. It is simply an irritant that can cause scarring of lung tissue in some people and not in others, depending on exposure limits and other environmental factors.
Limiting exposure is the sound solution for prevention. How extreme one limits that exposure is up to them..
Excellence is its own reward!
Good suggestions. Thanks for your thoughtful, sobering input. I've got asbestos (tranxite?) wall and ceiling panels in the kitchen that will be professionally removed. My GC is in no hurry to tackle the floor tiles, which are in an adjacent room.
Hi Dave...never wrong to err on the side of caution and good point about all the others that come into contact with this product after we're done ripping it out.
I'm surprised that real estate laws have not required home owners to disclose this type of information before selling a property. There is no way that the owners before me didn't know about these tiles as I found a box of them stashed away in the basement - the asbestos content clearly marked on the box.
Mike
What do you do about the mastic when the tiles are removed. I had no problems removing the tiles, most popped off whole with a few hold outs. But I did get discoloration of the vinyl tiles after a while. Finally used ceramic tile and wood in those areas, but have LR,DR, & Kit left to do and I would like to use vinyl at least in the kitchen.
I re-did my kitchen floor that in retrospect I think had asbestos tiles. It didn't occur to me at the time that the tiles contained any asbestos. But what worked well to remove them in this case, was to use a wrecking bar to rip up the T&G hardwood flooring that was underneath the 60's tile. The 2 1/4" oak came up in sections about 4 or 5 boards wide, with the tile still attached. I used a circular saw with a sacrificial blade to cut some slices perpendicular to the lay of the oak, down through the tile and the oak, which made it a lot easier to pry up.
I used a respirator during this work out of common sense. I just bundled up the wood/tile and put it in the trash. Aside from the few 1/8" wide cuts I made, I don't think I made too much dust. Anyway, that's water under the bridge at this point - had no clue they used asbestos in floor tiles until someone told me after the fact.
Around here, I would be surprised if the trash collectors would take bags that were clearly labeled "ASBESTOS". I thought that unless you wanted to pay a licensed asbestos removal contractor to do it, your only other option was to sneak it into someone elses dumpster as someone else posted in this thread. The cynic in me thinks that these "licensed asbestos removal contractors" will just put the asbestos in someone's dumpster too, but what do I know.
Acctually the public sanitation department and landfills around here are required to take the waste material. We have a drop off site for hazardouse waste that is open two days a week, and manned by a trained staff. A lot of these programs exist around the country, but are not common knowledge. Asbestos is not an environmental toxin so it goes to the same land fill as other waste. The purpose of double bagging and labelling is to protect those that handle it as it passes through the waste stream. Your or my exposure risk is minnimal when compared to people that work in the waste disposal industry. They literally handle thousands of ton of unknown waste every day. A garbage can of asbestos tile is not much in the big picture of waste disposal, but why not help as much as you can, even if they charge a small handling fee. After all those people have loved ones that want them to remain healthy and long lived, just as we do.
Dave
Dave, I've had to rip up a few (scores) of asbestos tile for bathroom renos. I wasn't sure what to do with the stuff for the first few jobs, but a call to the town garage (they take care of the trash disposal for the town) informed me that as long as the tile is soild, I can throw 1 cubic foot of the stuff in the household trash with no other precautions. I do double bag the stuff and instead of the household trash I cart it to the transfer station and deposit it in the construction debris container.
The town stated that labeling the asbestos tile wasn't required for the <1 CF disposal. But I agree, it makes sense to forewarn the future handlers of the waste.
I never met a tool I didn't like!
I remember seeing some old timers lay a sheet of tarpaper in the mastic and then another layer of mastic over the tarpaper to bed the tiles back in the sixties, just before they quit using asbestos tiles and went to vinyl, when I were a kid. I remember them complaining that the vinyl wouldn't last half as long as the asbestos tiles they were laying at the time. grumbles about govt. intervention, etc.
The mastic often had asbestos fibres in it also.
Excellence is its own reward!
That makes TOTAL sense now that you bring it up - tar paper. That's exactly what I was dealing with. Puts that mystery to rest now!
Mike
Brooklyn,
I removed all of the 1955 tile from our last ranch.It popped up pretty easy really,only a few stubborn spots where the mastic bonded "too"well. If you go over the tile, I'm pretty sure that if you go to sell the house there is a hazards disclosure that you'll have to sign;and if you rightfully put down that you know that there is asbestos material in the house,it could be a deal killer.
People get real nervous when they hear the word asbestos.If you call the garbage collector and ask if they'll take it I'd be suprised if they would help at all.They wouldn't even take my refridgerator last month because of "environmental regulations".When I got rid of my tile I waited till after garbage day when the cans would all be empty,filled them all (or half full anyway because they get HEAVY),and took them to a store's dumpster behind the mall.Would they appreciate that? It's part of the cost of selling $50 tennis shoes and $30 jeans.
Barry
Your first point is a key reason why I am working to get all old asbestos-type building materials out of the house. There's a high fear factor, plus I expect all states will eventually require full disclosure down the road.
I have frquently used dry ice in a cloth sack dragged over the tiles to pop the adhesive or glue loose. Keep the bag moving and use a putty knife to pick up each tile as it is loosened from the floor. (Hint ICE CREAM COMPANIES HAVE DRY ICE). This is quicker and causes less of a hazard than flames or electric heaters. The double bag proceedure given in other posts is good as is the use of a respirator. After tile is up, flood the glue area with water before scrapping as the glue may have asbestos in it also.
I demoed lots of that stuff back in the 1960's and 70's. One thing to try on the mastic is water, a lot of that old black gunk was actually water soluable after you get the tile scraped off of it. Working with it wet also helps a lot to keep dust out of the air. As for respirators, I didn't use any back in the old days, but now I have a surplus gas mask from the 1991 gulf war, which is the greatest for that kind of thing, and it was only about $10. There should be plenty around from the recent war.
-- J.S.
Thanks for the advice. Water and respirator it is!