Had a flooded basement, caused by record snowfall here in Anchorage, AK. Pulled all the carpet/padding out and am now considering replacement options. Wife thinks I'm procrastinating; no, I'm thinking... It appears that at one time the entire basement was tiled with, guess what, 9" tile (asbestos). One room was still tiled, so I got to see it, as well as remove it, carefully. Kept the concrete wet while we putty-knifed as much of the (2% asbestos, I'm told) mastic as we could. We got down pretty far--the swipe-lines are very visible and may be all the way through to the concrete. Rest of the basement has mastic remaining as well, a little heavier coat than the one I left in the one room. I don't really want to bring in a sander and make the mastic-asbestos airborn. The remaining mastic has left some texture to the floor that shows through a test section of 1st Kilz primer, then coated with Behr "1-part epoxy acrilic concrete & garage floor paint". What other opions do I have for painting the floor that won't show the mastic-texture? Chemical remover? Sub-floor? A layer of self-leveling concrete or other such material? Stop worrying about the texture and just paint it? Then there's the option of scrapping the paint idea and laying down "pergo". The sales person at Home Depot claimed I could just lay it down right on the floor, no sub-floor, no self-leveling material, don't bother filling in the little nail-pops left from removing the carpet tack-board. I'm skeptical, and, that'll cost me probably 2 grand for the easy snap-in tongue-and-groove she suggested. She also claimed I could easily remove it later if the basement flooded again and I could lay it back down after the clean-up. What's true and what's fantasy? Any help is very much appreciated as I need to get this project going ASAP. Many thanks.

I have a 1/2" engineered hardwood that I was going to have installed on a 3mm 3-in-1 underlayment, which would get me close to my existing adjacent floor height of 5/8". The existing engineered hardwood there is super noisy from underneath, so I also wanted to do everything I could to reduce sound. But an installer I talked to instead recommended 15# or 30# roofing felt. My concerns are twofold: 1) Not sure the height will be close enough to the existing floor height, resulting in poor transitions and a gap under the kitchen cabinets, which were installed directly on top of the floor. 2) Not sure about the sound deadening capability of roof felt. Most underlayments provide IIC and STC specs for apples-to-apples comparison. Only info I can find on sound deadening qualities of roof felt is anecdotal. Any suggestions/thoughts? Thanks!