floor is now vegan
i got my soybean mastic remover yesterday and worked on the floor last night and this morning. nitin came over last night to help me and we poured the stuff out on the floor and i spread it out with a push broom to cover the whole floor without being too thick. we waited about an hour and then started getting the stuff back up. it was really nice not having to worry about ventilation during this whole process and this stuff had a pleasant orange smell.
the company's literature says that after their stuff sits for a while and pulls up the mastic, things will have the consistency of "very old motor oil." my hunch, which was proven correct last night, was that the consistency would actually be closer to what one would see if 5000 rednecks from alabama all congregated in our basement with chewing tobacco.
we picked up a 35-lb container of cat litter to assist with the cleanup. my initial plan was to squeegee everything into one area and then toss the litter on top to absorb it all, but i found it really hard to adequately move all that goop with the squeegee. what we ended up doing instead was sprinkling the litter all over the floor and pushing the litter with the squeegee, letting it absorb the goop as it moved along. this worked amazingly well, but did leave a whole lot of litter morsels on the floor that we had to deal with later.
while we were waiting for the mastic remover to do its thing, we went out to home depot and i bought a pressure washer. the initial plan had been to pressure wash the floor last night to clean up all the remaining residue, but i ended up getting a gas model and by the time we were ready to start this part of the cleaning it was past 10pm so i decided to wait until morning. i'm glad i did, as we found out today that this little bugger is LOUD.
we sprayed the floor with a standard pressure washer cleaning detergent and then pressure washed everything. in a perfect world, i would've had us go really slowly with the pressure washer and get every last bit up, but given that the now-defunct floor drain in this part of the basement has already been sealed up, this would have generated quite a bit of water to contend with. instead, stacey manned the sprayer and did the back-and-forth at a less OCD pace. she started at the end furthest from the laundry area and then worked her way towards it, steering everything towards the functioning floor drain in there. i followed up afterwards with a mop. because i have some sort of weird fetish for wet mops and suspect that in another life i was stanley spadowski.
i was an idiot and forgot to take some pictures before i left the house, but the end result is that the floor went from a black color to more of a light brown. in talking with the asbestos contractor who was at our house way back when, it sounds like all mastic removers leave floors this color--it all comes down to the whole mastic-concrete interaction. not that i particularly care how it looks, as the bathroom will be tiled and the lounge area will have some sort of yet-to-be-determined floor covering. there are still a few spots that have a bit of mastic on them, but i think we can live with this seeing as how the vast majority is now gone.