Hi /r/diy,I'm closing on my first home on 8/11, and my apartment lease ends 8/31, so we have a healthy amount of time to tackle some small projects at the house before moving in. One of those projects is refinishing the wood floors in the living room and downstairs bedrooms (professionally) as well as painting.It appears the seller had a coat of polyurethane applied to the wood floors to make them look glossy for the real estate listing, but did not have them properly sanded beforehand. There are visible stains and the urethane coating is not smooth, even gritty in places.The living room and bedrooms are connected by a hallway which has at least two visible layers of vinyl laid on top of it. This brings the hallway flush with the kitchen and the bathroom at the end of the hall (you step down into living room and bedrooms). See photo.We assume there is wood flooring underneath the vinyl since the closets in the hallway have wood flooring and are at the same level of the living room and bedrooms. Our current plan is to rip up the vinyl flooring in the hallway so that when the floor company comes, they can refinish all the wood and do their best to make it match.My concern is what we may find in removing the vinyl. The top layer is relatively new -- they may have even installed it right before listing the property. The house was built in 1945 and there is a small section of 9x9, likely asbestos containing tiling upstairs. Could we be opening a can of worms by removing the vinyl? If 9x9 tiles are found underneath the top layer, and we can remove them without breaking them, what about the mastic underneath? Any good tips to remove that without damaging the wood?The flooring company will sand down wood w/ adhesive on it for an extra $0.50/sqft but if there's a chance it contains asbestos, that's the last thing I want them to do (making it friable and scattering it all over the home).The other option is to remove the first layer of vinyl and put a more attractive new vinyl or tile down, but we would prefer to restore the potential wood if at all possible.What would /r/diy do in this situation? Thanks for any advice! via /r/DIY http://ift.tt/2tHNade
