Okay, I need some good advice from some experts here.
Here's some background: The house I moved into 3 years ago was remodeled and maintained in unimaginable ways. The laundry list of problems, botch jobs, hack jobs, and code violations is a mile long. It's been a long uphill climb for me and my wife to right the wrongs while redoing the house.
Now we've come to the last room in the house to be redone: the hall bath. We've decided to do give it a mini-makeover for the time being and gut everything except the tub and shower. After I removed the 5 layers of wallpaper and paint and removed the wooden baseboards, it appears that the past inhabitants put a thick slick of joint compound on the walls and effectively built the walls out until they were flush with the tile baseboards (this is what was behind the wood). If I remove the tile, I will have to end up filling in the gap with joint compound and basically fixing the wall to make it flush again.
Risking the possibility of perpetrating a hack job myself, my question is, is it safe to tile over the tile that current exists at the base of the wall or must I remove it and repair the wall first? Mind you, the previous owners tiled the floor over the existing tile, and both layers are coming up (the top layer is coming up all by itself!). It's always been my rule to never tile over tile, but seeing how, if I do it, it will be on the wall with no weight on it, it might squeak by as being marginally okay.
Thanks for the advice, folks!