Hi,

We live in an ex-council semi and some of the original floors were finished with a brown, smooth material (careful) that my wife reckons was always called "composite". Apparently it used to be just polished but covered with carpets if you could afford them. The surface is hard but when you break it you find a thin brown skin about 3mm thick over a darker ash like substance which breaks up easily and if you heat it up, or just hit it you get a smell like gas. The first time I had to drill some fixing holes through it I thought I'd hit a gas pipe but it was just this flooring getting hot around the drill bit!

Anyway, several years ago we had "Rhinofloor" cushion floor professionally laid throughout the kitchen, utility room and hall but after a few months we noticed yellow stains on the flooring, but only where it was laid over composite; on concrete substrate the finish was fine, there was no discolouration. We had the flooring supplier come out and he took a sample from under a kitchen unit and sent it away for analysis. Turns out the glue for holding down the flooring was reacting with the composite and making a yellow stain on the top surface of the flooring.

Thanks for your patience so far but the point of my rambling is, do you think I could replace the Rhinofloor in the kitchen with tiles and what would I need to do to stop the composite affecting the tiles or grout? Someone out there must have tiled over this stuff before?

Thanks again for your patience and I know the answer will be out there....

Garfield

Sounds like a bitumen type material, I would guess that the solvent in the glue used to stick down your vinyl softened what is an oil based material.
If at all possible i would recommend removing all of this coating before tiling.

If not possible I think there are specialist primers out there that will seal it off and allow you to tile on top as long as it is solid - anyone from Mapei want to comment?