Home DIY

@Chalfie We have had a delonghi dem10 for a couple of years. Get 2 litres out of the air every day or so. If you can site it near a drain you can actually run a pipe straight from it so you dont have to empty the tank. mrs_com_in-law got one of the £100 ones from B&Q and reckons it is as good.

ta

Similar to the request of Mishk, I have a load of salvaged parquet which has bitumen on the underside - has anyone used an adhesive that will bond this to the concrete under-floor?

Also hints and tips gladly accepted.

Once something is contaminated with bitumen,
especially something old, like your parquet flooring,
that was probably fixed with a hot-poured bitumen 'glue',
there isn't much choice.
However if the bitminous layer is brittle it may splinter/fall off when hit edge on with a bolster,
leaving the underside relatively clean,
with the remainder removed by not (too) much sanding.
Try a couple, and you may be lucky as presumably the actual wood is a dense hardwood
which has not 'sucked up' any of the bituminous goo.
If you can get the bituminous layer off,
you are probably good to go with a modern material, probably acrylic based.

Not sure if it would work but you could try a hand planer in a bench configuration (i.e. upside down ) and you pass the pieces over the blade using it like a thicknesser. A thicknesser could probably do the job faster as long as the bitumen doesn't affect the blades.

with a heat gun and scraper

the nice thing about bitumen is it is thermoplastic and re-usable

unlike a modern epoxy / acrylic bond agent

Set it on fire, the bitumen will melt/burn off

I think the table saw is winning this currently- unless anyone knows why that would not work?

Does anyone SE have a jigsaw I could borrow over the weekend? I've a cat flap to fit.

Yep, I have one you are welcome to borrow.

Re parquet- what about this? http://www.f-ball.co.uk/product_detail.asp?catID=wood&product=F21

This is the stuff.

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Thanks Neil, will PM you.

I read on the Internet that with that Lecol 5500 glue it will work without any removal of the bitumen. I'd already started getting my blocks as clean as possible anyway so it would've messed with the thickness of the flooring I'd already cleaned and stuck down (with a different brand glue) if i did it differently.

For scraping them I swapped between a scraper kinda tool and a 2" chisel. White spirit on a rag will help to wipe off the gooey shit when your tool gets clogged.

Leave the blocks out side or somewhere cool before scraping as it comes off a lot better when it's cold.

Got the glue from http://www.builderdepot.co.uk/ just about got it in an ortlieb pannier but it felt ready to split at the seams.

As @diable said, it is both horrible and soul destroying.

Dust mask essential. Do it over a massive dust sheet. On an old table, also covered in a massive dust sheet.
Don't walk around in the dust as it will stick to the bottom of the shoes and leave bituman all over the place.

Have you got a table saw?

It would clog the blade to death, you'd need to run them over a planer/through a thicknesses to try and get the thickness right afterward...

If they are reclaimed they've already been sanded once to match the first uneven floor they were laid on so if you were running them over s table saw just to skim the bituman off chances are a load of them will be 5mm off already which if you were pushing them through a saw against a fence would do you over.

Ah man, it's so much work.

But well worth it. They look sick when down.

Still not got round to sanding/finished mine.

Anyway, I will go now.

One of the upstairs neighbours was getting rid of her sitting room floor- which is the same as mine, a hardwood (oak?) parquet, so I offered to take it off her hands.

I've had her entire floor sat in Ikea bags in my spare bedroom for ages, so laid a couple of the bags out today to see how much I had - more than I thought, it would appear.

I need to take out one of the sections of screed to level things off, then put these down, then sand the whole floor and stain it so that it's one colour throughout.

I'm kind of hoping that sanding the whole floor will level off any slightly proud blocks if there are any, and any that are a bit low I was just going to build up with a little additional adhesive.

A friend of mine just recommended this:

Which apparently means that you can simply stick the blocks down with the bitumen still on them.

I had a tin of that Sika brand stuff before I got the Lecol stuff, it was sound but opening the tin was a bit hard and the seal around the lid was never the same again so ended up wasting a bit through it drying up down the sides and the last inch or so in the bottom of the tin, that's the only reason I didn't buy it again when I ran out half way through the job. That Lecol stuff has a nice band around the top of the tin with a clasp which you can reuse to seal the tin up nice and tight between sessions, even the stuff on the side of the tin seems to run down into the remainder so no waste.
(I found I could only lay a number of blocks at a time before it was too stressful trying to keep gaps from opening up)

+1 for the ikea bags!
If you look carefully on the left there you can see how twisted the edge of the sika adhesive got from my opening.

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parquet on a narrow boat - nightmare! ;)

Yes, that looks fun.

My floor is screed over concrete, said screed is painted- opinions seem to vary on this, but some suggest that I should sand the paint off to reveal the screed.

I would imagine that this is due to absorption rates- any input? I will email the adhesive companies support people on this one as it is fairly important!

could you set up a small jig and use an electric planer to shave a couple of mm off the bottom and ensure they're all the same thickness?

edit: hadn't refreshed the page, horsee got there first.

This is what they all look like- it's a (very) thin coating of bitumen rather than a chunky uneven layer.

given your upward mobility and international travel agenda, would it not be more convenient (and expedient) to hand flat keys to a parquet contractor and come back in a week to a lovely herringbone floor?

You forget how mean I am.

Plus my (I admit ridiculous) renaissance man obsession.