Plumber finally came yesterday and stripped out entire bathrom, leaving me a clear field to remove old tiles before he returns on Monday to fit the new stuff. We wanted to get rid of the floor to ceiling 6 inch square white tiles and replace just to dado height apart from round the shower area, plastering or arstecing above the dado. All the tiles are off now, revealing a layer of.....floor to ceiling 6 inch off white tiles:( These are rock solid, and I dont want to hack them off, in case the wall plaster beneath comes apart, setting the whole job back by weeks while I get a plasterer in. A quick confab with wife, and here is the plan: put new tiles as planned, but over old, solid tiles. The question is, above my new tiles, above dado height, is it feasible to skim coat, or arstec over the old tiles? Does arstec stick to tiling?
We have waited the best part of a year to get this job on the go (let down by several plumbers) so I don't want this to set us back any more. Any advice much appreciated.
On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 11:37:03 GMT, "Zipadee Doodar" scrawled:
I wouldn't even entertain the idea of tiling\plastering over old tiles. Remove the old tiles, replaster as neccesary. It will be much easier for the plasterer to patch\skim a plaster wall than some glazed tiles, if he even attempts it that is.
I'm assuming you've got at least 2 internal walls in this room? Worst case, new plasterboard and a bag of bonding and 4 solid, new, flat walls.
Plastering over old tiles, worst case, uneven plaster gives way and ends up in the bath with you.
We installed a power shower and found our bathroom tiles started falling off.. ..only to reveal a second set underneath. Tiler at that time said it was OK to tile over the tile layer underneath - he would use a strong waterproof adhesive and the second layer of tiles wouldn't come off. He said that in all probability stripping the base tile layer would probably mean replastering. We reluctantly went with his advice.
A mere 14 or so years later, he was right. The tiles didn't come off. The only nuisance value has been that with a second layer of tiles, clearance can be a problem since the walls now encroach further over the bath. We had to take care over our choice of taps otherwise the bath taps would have been unusable because of the proximity of the tiles. If you have a choice I wouldn't do it, though we did and generally it worked out OK.
Winding forward to the present, the bathroom is being completely refitted. Once gain tiling rears it's head and I was determined to get rid of both tile layers - even if the walls needed complete replastering over the brickwork. I decided to try and remove the tiles and see if I could save the plaster.
Wickes sell a scraping knife which has a steel cap to the handle so that you can use a hammer on it. The scraper is heavy duty - slightly thicker and stronger than the general wallpaper scrapers they sell. It costs about £5. Using this and some care I successfully removed both layers (one at a time) keeping the plaster largely intact. The problem you may have is that you will still have an uneven surface from tile cement so I guess it would need to be sanded. In our case our porcelain tiles required almost perfect walls and a thin layer of adhesive so in the end we had the walls skimmed - it took about a week to go off.
So there you have it - we've done it both ways. One caveat though. When I was stripping the base tile layer where the 'falling tiles' problem had occurred because of the power shower, the tiles almost fell away from the wall, making me think we'd been luck having a very thick second layer of tiles with a strong adhesive. I think the adhesive bond between tile layers is all that was holding things up in that area.
About your plumber. Our bathroom wall skim effectively halted work for ten days. The plumber/tiler/electrician have just gone on to other work and return to finish off this week, so I guess a delay is fairly normal. We waited seven months to get the job started and to their credit they've taken things in their stride. The last bathroom work lasted 14 years and I won't rush this one if it means we risk having tiles falling off, etc. because we hurry too much. We've not had a functional bathroom for about three weeks now. Fortunately the neighbours are friendly (or they just couldn't stand the smell ;-)
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