Painting old linoleum?
I’ve been reading on painting a vinyl floors – sure, a good scuffing by sanding may have been needed in the past for adhesion of many paints to many surfaces, but many of the recent tutorials describe various brands of primer designed for good adhesion without sanding. These come in handy not only when you have a material you don’t want to disturb via sanding for safety reasons, and also just to save labor time (and cleaning up the resulting sanding dust) even when the existing covering could safely be sanded. With proper cleaning first to get off dirt and grease, but with no sanding at all, the reports on how the paint job holds up, when combined also with the right sort of paint and sealant topcoats, are quite positive.
I think flat, synthetic, commercial carpeting, if one decides nailing through existing coverings is an OK risk, or carpeting or something else dense glued on, is preferable, as it makes for a surface that is easier to clean (just vacuum, no mopping needed) and absorbs hallway sound. (Another option would be painting the risers and glueing carpeting strips to the treads – that would cut down on nailing needed to get a tight fit around the tread edges. Someone noted they took off the metal tread edging first, which, depending on your stairs, might get you down to nailing into bare, or just painted wood there, with no chance of disturbing asbestos fibers with nailing.)
If someone prefers paint to carpet, there is no reason not to paint it – just be sure to pick the materials (primer, paint, sealant) carefully, and be sure to not skimp on multiple cleaning passes with degreasing cleaner first.
brokelin
in General Discussion 4 years and 4 months ago
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stickerhappy | 4 years and 5 months ago
Our common hall stairs look horrible. They are wood underneath but at some point many years ago they were covered with one type of weird red linoleum on the tread and another fake wood paneled type on the riser which are not looking good. I’m betting they have asbestos so I’m probably not going to rip them off but was wondering if maybe I could paint them to make them look decent?
Anyone have any advice for this type of job? Or maybe another solution? [BF9600D4-4210-4BF6-A271-E9B43824CDA3](//muut.com/u/brownstoner/s3/:brownstoner:xDsb:bf9600d442104bf6a271e9b43824cda3.jpeg.jpg)
stickerhappy | 4 years and 5 months ago
Or maybe it can be covered over with something else?
brokelin | 4 years and 5 months ago
I think what you want to do is cover it over with very low-pile, synthetic, commercial carpeting – something in a heathery color that contains a few different colors in it. It will hide dirt well, and due to its synthetic nature, will be a breeze to clean. That’s what my coop did when the old carpeting was replaced shortly after I moved in, and it stayed new looking with just vacuuming every other week and spot cleaning when someone tracked something in (it was easy to get stuff off with a scrub brush dish soap.) After a few years, we sprung for a professional cleaning every year or two, which was surprisingly cheap. When I moved out, it looked as just about as good as it did when it was installed almost a decade earlier.
While there are lots of tutorials online for painting vinyl and linoleum with proper preparation, primer, paint and sealer coats, and reports are that these hold up well, these are generally for residential applications. They involve a lot of painstaking work, and I presume would get scratched up more in a public hallway and need repainting. Carp eting probably lasts much longer than a paint job, and is easier to clean than something that needs to be swept and mopped. Carpet also has the advantage of quieting footfalls, making for less noise in apartments when people are walking by.
The key is to use low-pile, synthetic, commercial carpeting, not the residential kind of carpet you’d use in your living room, which is what all those buildings with flattened, matted, stained and terrible looking carpeting have on their stairs (I hated the way the stairway carpeting looked in most of the places I looked at to buy.) Make sure you get something that doesn’t offgas a smelly chemical, and make sure it is is nailed to your stairs (not glued), as some carpets, and the glues used when commercial carpeting is glued down, can offgas for years, and have given me asthma (in the case of cheap residential carpeting off gassing what I think was formaldehyde) and headaches (from the glues or carpet used in a an office I worked in once after new carpet was glued down – it smelled like glue for years.) I believe the carpet store that installed ours used carpet padding and used a nailgun to tightly nail the carpet around the stair treads, not glues – as we had no problems with off gassing. We had to have them come back and re-stretch and fix a few places in the hallways where there was excess loose carpeting (so clearly it wasn’t glued there) a week after it was installed, and after that we had no problems with it.
I can’t recommend the carpet store as it is no longer in business, but any carpet store should be able to handle this job. Take (or email) a photo of what you have there now to a carpet store, and find out if they can nail carpeting over what is there. It has been some years, and I think I was at work the day the carpet was installed, so I don’t recall seeing what was under the old carpet in our place, but I presume that there was some sort of linoleum or vinyl, not bare wood, as the building was built as a 4-flat and was always apartments (not single family) and was then over 100 years old. I’m pretty sure that they did not pull up anything but the old carpeting (as I priced and ordered it and that was not included in the price, just old carpet removal), but it is possible that any old floor covering was removed when the prior carpeting was installed twenty-some years earlier. Talk to the carpet store and they can tell you what they can do. If they say you need to remove it, you can send small samples of the materials now there, and the glues they were applied with, to a lab to be tested first for the presence of asbestos, and if you need to remove asbestos-containing materials, it can be removed safely with proper precautions taken. (It may not contain asbestos – real linoleum is a natural product that does not, but it isn’t clear what the materials on the risers is, or what materials any backing or the glues used might contain – but there is no reason to presume there is asbestos when it can be tested.) I doubt that it is generally removed when carpeting is installed on stairs (and I don’t remember the carpet store asking what was under the existing carpeting, as I don’t remember ever seeing or knowing what was under the existing carpeting, though it is possible we pulled up a corner and saw wood and I just don’t remember), unless it is loose and thus presents a hazard, but I’m not a professional – ask one. They may have assumed that if the carpeting was there without any loose places or hazards, then they could just replace the existing carpeting safely.
If carpeting is not an option, then look into painting – but don’t underestimate the amount of work involved in prepping, priming, painting and sealing – and you’ll need primers and paints appropriate for the materials, which means the metal end caps may require something different for primer and/or paint than what you use on the treads and risers. While I am considering painting an old vinyl kitchen floor, which is why I’ve seen all the youtube tutorials, I wouldn’t take on the work of doing an entire building’s public staircase and hallways myself these days – maybe when I was younger and did more DIY, but probably not even then. I would consider hiring it out to someone who would do it right so the paint job would last, and not someone who would just slap a coat of paint on it that would wear easily – but that won’t be a cheap job, so I’d also compare that cost to the cost of installed carpeting – plus the cost of professional asbestos-containing material removal, if lab testing confirms the presence of asbestos, if it even needs to be removed to have carpeting installed. I’m pretty sure the labor time involved in a correctly done paint job (prep plus primer, coats of paint and sealant) is much more than the hours it would take to cut and nail down carpeting – that goes pretty fast when done by professionals.
brokelin | 4 years and 5 months ago
Although, it occurs to me that it might be that driving nails into asbestos containing vinyl, or old vinyl backing or adhesives used to apply the flooring that contained asbestos, might disturb asbestos fibers and let them into the air as dust.. And might continue to do so every time you walk up and down the stairs through the nail holes – I don’t know if that could present an ongoing risk, but I do know that generally when covering asbestos flooring, one is supposed to cover and not disturb them.
So maybe see if there is such thing as carpet adhesive that doesn’t contain harmful chemicals that offgas and cause headaches or otherwise damage health – they might exist, as not all places with glued carpeting give me headaches for years on end. I don’t know if they exist, but they might.
In any case, I’d do the asbestos testing first (before nailing or glueing carpet) so you know what is under there for any needed future repairs or projects.
If there is asbestos-containing material, and you don’t want to spring for proper removal, you might look into other ways of cove ring the stairs that would not involve disturbing what is there in any way – including covering with vinyl (would require glue), or covering with ceramic tiles using tile adhesive. Perhaps you could cut thin plywood underlayment, which is often recommended to be added as underlayment when covering floors, that would fit the treads and risers tightly and not require nailing to stay in place. Perhaps you could even cover them with wood treads and risers, rather than uncovering the wood beneath the flooring, and then tack a runner rug or those carpet stair pads if that is too noisy. You’d want whatever you added on top to be structurally safe and not come loose, so I would consult with some professionals who could advise you before doing covering them up – yours can’t be the first building to have this problem, so others may have covered them safely.
It may be that proper painting and sealing could be your best option.
brokelin | 4 years and 5 months ago
For a really cheap DIY floor covering option that would not disturb what’s there, google paper floors – you use pieces of brown paper bags (or a roll of new such paper) and glue. With enough layers of poly on top, that might be more durable than paint. You could maybe just paint the metal caps in that case. Though you’d need to research if that works well over vinyl – it might require a plywood underlayment. .
Cork flooring – in sheets or tiles – is another great flooring material that is glued down. With enough sealant, it is fairly durable, though you need to consider the amount of water it might encounter (might work with entry mats that absorb wetness from shoes or boots.) Again, I don’t know if it needs a plywood underlayment, or if it could be glued to what’s there. Would also reduce noise in the hallway.
Plywood – stained or painted – and sealed – is also used as flooring to cover other flooring material.
stevecym | 4 years and 5 months ago
We removed an asbestos tile floor about 15 years ago. I checked the laws at the time and flooring was not considered an asbestos job (it is considered non friable asbestos containing material or acm). I just now took a very quick look on the net and our closest neighbor, NJ, still considers tiles a non asbestos job. I tried to look at what NYC and NYS say about the flooring, but the search returns a lot of non sense, with ads and a lot of stuff to read through before addressing the floor tiles directly. the Federal EPA returned something from 1992 which simply raises a lot of questions.
We did not even bother to test the flooring. We assumed it contained asbestos and wet the floor a little and wore P100 masks.
if this were my home, i would check the laws and read up on the safety. what you are looking for is “non friable asbestos containing material (acm)”. if this is still legal to do, i would do it in my own home.
in case you decide to do this yourself and wish to get it up with minimal disturbance to the product, this is what we did: we pic ked up 25 lbs of dry ice from the place under the kosciuko bridge. we had them slice it into 1″ thick slabs and we set the slabs on the flooring and it broke the bond in the adhesive.
I am not condoning this, but when i first came to NYC in 1995, there were still men working who had handled asbestos and never bothered wearing masks. they did other equally dumb things like smoke cigarettes and so far as i know, most of them made it to old age.
evan | 4 years and 5 months ago
We had pretty much the exact same stairs – unfortunately not in the budget to do a more complete fix just yet, so we painted over with a high quality/performance primer and paint and covered with a stair runner (I believe from Overstock or Wayfair). We’re happy with how it turned out, and everything’s still holding up well 2 years later. Not the best pics, but here’s a before and after [Stairs before](//muut.com/u/brownstoner/s2/:brownstoner:lRfV:stairsbefore.jpeg.jpg) [Stairs after](//muut.com/u/brownstoner/s3/:brownstoner:eOkB:stairsafter.png.jpg)
evan | 4 years and 5 months ago
Oh, and I should note that the job involved minimal disruption to the existing surface and created very little dust/debris (messiest part was removing the metal nosings, and even that wasn’t too bad). We (professionally) removed a lot of asbestos tile in our basement but this just didn’t seem like a concern here.
stickerhappy | 4 years and 5 months ago
Thanks for all the advice.
Evan, did you remove the metal nosings or just cover over them?
How did you attach the runner?
stickerhappy | 4 years and 5 months ago
And Anyone have a good rec for someone who installs that type of commercial carpet runner on stairs?
evan | 4 years and 5 months ago
Removed the metal nosings and attached the runner with a staple gun. We used a local contractor: https://www.yelp.com/biz/underconstruction-aks-brooklyn cost ~$500 if I recall (not including materials)
stevecym | 4 years and 5 months ago
Sticker happy: this is easy to do. I did one for a landlord years ago. The first few steps, tucking and seating it around turns are tricky. But once you get going it is easy enough.
cate | 4 years and 5 months ago
OP, there are neighborhood flooring and carpet installers all over Brooklyn who are experts and can do this sort of work quickly and cheaply. Look around near where you live.
stickerhappy | 4 years and 5 months ago
Thanks, Cate.
Anyone with a good carpet rec in Park Slope area?
I see Caesars on 5th Ave near 15th St.but never saw a rec for them.
stickerhappy | 4 years and 5 months ago
Anyone have experience painting them? Or know a good high traffic paint?
hkapstein | 4 years and 5 months ago
I don’t see how paint could make the situation worse.
stevecym | 4 years and 4 months ago
Urbandad, op probably has concerns about adhesion of the paint. I have finished all sorts of things – wood, metal, fiberglass, but never lino. Perhaps someone out there has done this?
stevecym | 4 years and 4 months ago
Op, the problem with painting things is we usually sand the surface to make things stick and we know that is not an option here. Though i suppose you could explore wet sanding it. I am wondering if there is a chemical that can be run over it first to soften it and break the surface before painting.
hkapstein | 4 years and 4 months ago
I mean, it’s easy enough to do a test patch no?