Tileing bathroom

[Scott Mills]

As some of you will know, I have the task of doing the bathroom over Christmas.

Now, she wants it done properly and I want to bodge it and tell her I have done it properly.

Currently the room is part tiled (about 3/4 on 2 walls) with mosac tiles which seem pretty flat. These will no doubt ruin the wall when they come off. So naturally I want to tile over them and not have to replaster my bathroom over christmas when I should be eating Turkey and pickle sandwiches.

My problem:

We want to fully tile the room. So how do I make up the gap between where I am going over tiles to where I am on plaster ie the 4mm thick or so of mosac tiles. My ideas are

1. screw (in lots of places) 4mm weatherboard ply onto the wall, wash it with PVA and tile on that beast? This part of wall won't be in direct contact with water, but we do like a hot shower. I will be using waterproof tile and grout.

1. bodging up the gap with plaster? - something I don't want to do...

Any ideas / past exeriances would be much appreciated!

Cheers Scott

[Bob Eager]

(etc.)

This may not help, but (!):

The previous owners of our house had this problem. They solved it in a novel way. They battened and boarded over the tiles, but only over the tiles. Then they tiled the lot, and fitted a moulding over the resulting

50mm gap betwen the edge of the raised area and the main wall. This runs all round the bathroom and is great for keeping things on!

[Dave Plowman]

I recently removed some tiles round a window that I'd replaced. The plaster was relatively new - about 20 years old - and the tiles fixed with ordinary wall tile stuff. I wanted to keep as many of them intact as possible, and used a thin filling knife to remove them. With very little damage to the plaster. Mosaic tiles tend to be quite strong, and don't break like ordinary ones.

[PoP]

They might not ruin the wall (some damage is obviously likely, but it doesn't have to resemble John Prescotts chins).

I have a bathroom to retile after the new year, and I've already taken about half the tiles off. The adhesive for the existing tiles couldn't have been very good because virtually all of the tiles I've taken off came away easily, leaving the usual wavy lines of adhesive on the wall (and very little adhesive on the back of the tiles).

I don't know how much effort is going to be required to smooth out and remove the old adhesive. I'm kind of hoping it'll be a simple job if the adhesive was that poor at holding the tiles on in the first place!

PoP

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[David P]

I would try removing a square foot of the mosaics. Wet thoroughly half-an-hour before removing, as if the grout/adhesive is non-waterproof, this will make a huge difference.

If this takes less than a couple of minutes and does no damage, then you're OK.

In my case, it took a whole day to remove the tiles, which were clearly attached with some fiendish concoction of Araldite, Superglue and chewing-gum, and then another day to finally give up on saving one stud partition wall, remove and replace the plasterboard. Very handy in the end though, as this was the wall with all the electrics (shaver point, mirror light, heater) as well as the shower, and having the wall down saved a lot of messing about.

If you leave them on, I would personally recommend plastering to make up the

4mm. Use a "one-coat" plaster which will easily do the 4mm in one go (don't make it too runny), and you're not bothered about the finish, so no plastering rocket-science involved. Won't take you long at all. I've levelled pre-tiling irregularities of over 10mm this way before.

Think of me, I'll be *laying* bloody mosaic tiles in my bathroom, which is no fun at all.

David

[Scott Mills]

not a route I want to go down, I want to do this quickly!

Cool, sounds like this might be the way forward. Thanks

The reason we getting rid of the mosaic's is the cleaning burden on the misses. The large amount of groute is apparenlty very hard to clean... just thought I'd let you know!

Cheers Scott