When finishing to fire-place hearths, stone walls and other irregular shaped obstacles with a hard surface floor, the best way to achieve a clean good-looking finish is to under-cut or remove a shallow, narrow section of material from the bottom.
First | Previous Picture | Next Picture | Last | Thumbnails
This is a concrete fireplace hearth that we are preparing to undercut. We mask off the cutting area with blue painter's tape to avoid chipping and marring of the surface. The hearth does already need a paint job especially at the bottom where the old carpet was finished to it held in place with tack strip. The tack strip was removed leaving those small divots in the concrete sub-floor. The carpet padding was also removed exposing the squiggly lines of adhesive residue.
The new floor will be a floating plastic wood core laminate which requires a lower tolerance for sub-floor preparation. In other words, the sub-floor doesn't need to be as smooth or as clean as if we were adhering something to it. The glue residue gets scraped smooth and the divots will be filled. If you choose not to fill the divots it would have no adverse effect on the performance of the floor.