Ceramic tile tearout

[LwnmwnMan2]

Anyone got any tips on tearing out about 300 sq ft of ceramic tile?? Other than using a sledge hammer w/chisel or a large "sidewalk ice scraper"??

My parents were nice enough to glue this stuff down about 20 years ago, and make sure the tiles never came up.

Now the tiles are starting to look pretty worn and my wife and I have decided to redo the floor, but I've got to get this tile up somehow.

Short of just taking a sawsall and cutting out the subfloor too, any help would be appreciated...

Thanks.

[ice_it_06]

A spud bar is ideal for ceramic tile

removal. Looks like a ice chisel and some are air operated even. Check your local rental joint maybe.

Other then that it gets pretty labor intensive with best luck of removing grout first and caulk or glue with a heat gun then prying them up with like a 4" putty knife or go to town with a spud bar if you can locate one.

[King Canada]

Consider putting another layer of tile right over the existing. If there aren't any cracks and it doesn't squeak it's perfectly acceptable.

[LwnmwnMan2]

We're putting in wood floors.

It's going to be in the kitchen, around a false wall, dining room, living room and down a hallway.

In the living room and hallway, it's carpet.

I know I can tear out the carpen, then just build up the floor so it's the same height as the tile and just go over the top.

Problem comes in with the trim. Now we're going to have to raise all the trim around the bottom up that much as well.

It's not that big of a deal in the kitchen, since there's no trim on the bottom of the cupboards / appliances, but in the living room there's a large closet, plus 3 doorways in the hallway.

The 3 doorways in the hallway, 2 are already tight to the carpet when you shut them, so I'm afraid that when I build the floor up, and then when you put the transition piece in, that the doors won't close.

Now, in order to get past that, I COULD pull all the doors out, trim the bottoms a hair and put the doors back in, after trimming the frames as well and that SHOULD get me past that issue.

Now after all that, including the work to build the carpeted areas up, it gets to be about as much work as just chiseling it all out.

Right now with a 5 lb hammer and a 5" chisel, it takes about 2-4 minutes to get a tile out.

I've got 27 done, with another 250 to go.

I love my parents.......

[CFRay]

I used a cats paw type nail remover that had one chisel type end, split, intended for lifting nails. That and a regular hammer would go under my tile removal job,(tiles were 8x8). The tiles would usually lift out in larger pieces. It proved to be less physical work than beating on the tiles. I was replacing the underlayment, I didn't have to be concerned with damage to that material.

Good Luck!

[nitrokfa]

rent a small elect. jack hammer should have it all removed in a couple hours. I install tile and works for me.

[eurolarva]

If it is that old dont be suprised to find a 5 inch thick mud floor with wire running through it that looks like rebar. If you want to take the whole mud floor the biggest crow bar you can find and a lot of hard work is what it will take.

[LwnmwnMan2]

One other thing I forgot, is that it's in a split, and the tile goes to the top of the stairs.

Well it's already about 1/2" above the current stair nose, and if I put the flooring over the top of the tile, now I'm going to be close to an inch over the top of the stair nose.

Also, we just rented a floor stripper, which should get under the tiles and pop them up, but my parents put epoxy down under all of it, not just around the edges of the tile, so the stripper would just ride up the edge of the epoxy and over the top of the tile.

My buddy's got an electric hammer with a chisel bit, that'll be over about 7 tonight.

I've gotten another 8 tiles taken out though...

[IFallsRon]

You're best option may be to bust through to the subfloor and tear it all out. Once you get the tile up, there's glue and residual mortor etc. You'll want a good base for the new floor.

I once rented a machine to take up old linoleum and carpet. It was all pretty attached to the dry-as-a-bone subfloor. I gouged it up pretty badly and when the floor guys arrived to put in the new stuff, they said I'd be better off putting in new subfloor. I think the tab for 12 sheets of 4 x 8 subfloor plus installation was about $450. In the end, I was pretty happy with the results.

It was a three-week delay to get the project done. We had the fridge in the garage, cooked on a camp stove and, fortunately, had a second bathroom as the main room was all in the path of distruction.