First, thank you for this message board.

It has been a tremendous help to my wife and me these past few weeks as we went about replacing our old, ugly floor with a beautiful wide plank solid hardwood floor throughout the first level of our house. We have completed three rooms so far, and it's absolutely beautiful! We couldn't have done it without the advice from the artisans and professionals on this website.

Now, here's a tip we discovered which we hope will come in handy for someone facing the same problem we had when removing glued-down, engineered flooring from a plywood subfloor.

We had to remove approx. 900 square feet of this stuff, and we tried everything we could find. For most of it, we used an air chisel with a wide, flat bit, which peeled up the floor an inch or two at the time. No matter how careful we were, it often took layers of the plywood subfloor with it. Even though it removed the old flooring, it left the old adhesive, and no manner of scraping or sanding- manually or mechanically- would get it up.

We ended up renting a power floor scraper, which peeled the glue away like a dream! We found that it also worked to remove the old wood flooring, too, if you go approach it width-wise. It's by no means fast, but it's better than anything else we found. Just make stops every now and then to sharpen the blade, because the glue dulls it quickly.

This is not the blade on the stick thing. It's an electric walk-behind unit, with two wheels and a blade on front that vibrates from side to side to 'shave' the floor.

We hope it helps someone out there. It sure helped us!

Good luck!