Removing a Linoleum Rug
After the front dries from scrubbing and cleaning, I take it outside and sand it down with a random orbital sander. After the sanding I apply a 50-50 mixture of BLO and turpentine. I let that dry and then start thinking about the next project as the living room is wrapping up. I plan to plaster the landing and finish staining the woodwork there. The landing was mostly stripped in the past so it shouldn’t be too much work to get into a state for plastering and staining. There are some old HVAC holes that contractors patched up with joint compound when they built the soffits for the new HVAC. Before I plaster, I want to examine these holes and patch them with drywall or lath to make sure I have more permanent fixes. I scrape off the joint compound and expose some drywall patches.
Back in the living room, the wood plugs I inserted are dry so sand those down and start wiping the floor down with GoofOff to remove all the gunk that I left on the floor from all of the plastering and paint stripping. Now that all of the major work is done, it’s time for the linoleum rug to go. This rug isn’t in great shape and has some damaged sections, but I will still try to remove this and keep intact as much as possible. I notice a lot of the rug is stapled down from when they installed carpet. They stapled the padding right over the linoleum so I need to remove all of the staples before I can peel it up. There’s also some nails that are trickier to remove because they are really dug into the linoleum and as I try to pull the rug up, it does tear in various spots because it is so brittle. It is a big battle to get the rug pulled up and slightly rolled up so I can move it into another room; definitely not a job for one person, but I manage to get it done. Like the other linoleum rugs in the house, this one also has a bunch of old newspapers under it. Unlike the other ones, some of the newspapers are completely black. They look burned, but I’m not sure if it is actually burnt or just the ink from the newspaper and the underside of the rug reacted with each-other. The blackened pages take some additional scraping to get up because like the rug, they are also super brittle and don’t easily peel up.
I finally get all the newspapers up and then I try to figure out if the blackened wood can be cleaned up.I grab a bunch of cleaners and try them all on the inky wood. I try the KleanStrip stripper, various GoofOff variants including one for paint removal, and a few different KrudKutters. I find that the tough job verion of KrudKutter seems to do the best. The other cleaners are OK, but it seems like KrudKutter is the only one to get thinks back to the original wood color. The problem is that it is very tedious work with applying the KrudKutter, letting it soak in, then lots of hard scrubbing and rinsing. After a while of floor scrubbing, I take another look at the entry door.
I take a look at entry door frame to do some more stripping of paint. The hinges and door james need a pass to remove white paint and then I’ll apply BLO to protect from rust and weather. While I’m working on stripping the door jams, I notice lots of little scratches in the stained door. Apparently I didn’t use the random orbital sander correctly and I left a lot of annoying little swirl marks in the wood. The scratches have a corkscrew pattern so there must have been some debris stuck in the sanding disc. I take the door off the hinges and take it back out to the backyard for a hand sanding. I cycle through various grits to get the swirl marks off. After that is done, I wipe everything down with turpentine and then apply a new coat of stain.
