bamboo

Floating Bamboo Question

Floating Bamboo Question — modern flooring photography

Q: I have a parquet floor over hard concrete. I would like to install cork underlayment and an engineered floating bamboo floor in its place. Some of the tiles are loose and in poor condition. The tiles themselves come up fairly easily, but the glue underneath them is another story. But the glue that was used is extremely thin as shown in the attached picture (the scrap wood spans both clean concrete and glue, the quarter is there for scale). My question is – do I really need to scrape all this glue up if it is thin like this? Cant I just lay the cork right over it?
Thanks!
Mike

Here is a photo Mike sent a long to give an idea of what he is working with and what he plans to install over.

A: With floating floors, especially those using premium underlayments, they can account for variances of subfloor height up to 1/16″. This being said, as long as you remove a majority of the high spots so that the entire floor is relatively even, you can install over the top of the adhesive. Keep in mind you will still need to use a moisture barrier for your installation to ensure that there is no worry of having moisture vapor get into the flooring itself.
If you have a few areas where a portion of the parquet is not getting pulled up easily you can go in with a portable belt sander or similar grinder to grind down the area to a height similar to the rest of the floor. It is in your best interest to scrape up as much of the adhesive as possible, but not necessary to remove all of it, just ensure that higher spots or build ups are removed enough to be within about 1/16″ of the height of the rest of the floor.