So after a few months of pinching our pennies the wife and I have just purchased some awesome laminate flooring for the main level of our house. Because I have installed laminate before and consider myself somewhat handy I decided that we would install it ourselves. There's a bit of a problem though.. Ok thats an understatement, there is a HUUUUGEE problem! and it involves what can only be describe as this awful hard clay/rubber under padding that has bonded itself to our floorboards. Clearly whoever lived in our house before us didn't want to attempt this battle because they placed a new under padding over top of this stuff before putting in a new carpet.

Now I've honestly spent a good 3 hours or so scouring the internet for any advice I can find on how I can defeat this monster but haven't found anything all that promising.

Here's what I'm wondering. Over the past few days we have been trying to scrape all of this stuff off the floor. In some areas it comes up without much of a problem at all, but in other areas it grips the floor like you wouldn't believe. No matter how much you scrape at it, it just wont budge. Here is my question: If I manage to scrape most of it off the floor to the point that it's only a millimeter thick would it be safe to assume that this wouldn't have a negative impact on my laminate flooring? I could even use a belt sander to make it a little bit flatter if needed.

We've honestly spent about 10 hours trying to remove this garbage from a 10sq ft area and we still haven't gotten rid of all of the orange substance. It's very flat and looks a lot like someone has put cast material all over the floor boards. We aren't trying to take the easy way out but we're pretty much at our wits end with this stuff and could really use some assistance on the matter.

Please if you have ever dealt with this before I am begging you for some answers for I fear this job will be the death of me.

P.S. whoever invented this 1970's underpad of hell is an awful individual!