Bathroom Tile Redo Nightmare

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C 22 years ago

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!

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HA HA Budys Here 22 years ago

Sounds to me like your only choice now is to gut the whole shebang and do it over, correctly. God knows what lies under all that.

Anything less is throwing good money after bad.

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Carolyn Marenger 22 years ago

In theory it sounds nice and easy to just lay another layer of tile on top. I am sure that it will come back to haunt you though. I would rip it all up, and start with a clean slate.

Carolyn

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Art Begun 22 years ago

You know the correct answer on this one without asking.

tile, I

basically

question is,

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C 22 years ago

Well, the only bad things I saw in this case were the floor (tile on tile), and the walls where they slicked it out to meet the tile along the floor. I'll post a question outside this thread about unfinished drywall.

The tub and shower are original, so no "improvements" there.. Even with the mini-makeover, we'll probably gut the whole thing in about 5 years or so. This quickie job is just to rid of the embarrassment. This is why I figured that since the 4" tile running along the wall would be okay seeing how it's going to be put up with mastic anyway.

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mark Ransley 22 years ago

Tile over the wall base , there will be no pressure on it , use a mastic not mortar, mortar wont bond

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C 22 years ago

Thanks. I also thought about taking a low-grit sandpaper and scuffing up the tiles first so the mastic would adhere better.

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Charles Spitzer 22 years ago

you can, but mastic is incredibly sticky in itself. there won't be any pressure for pulling off the tile, so it should stick on a wall just fine without it.

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mark Ransley 22 years ago

glue on a nice piece of wood molding, cheaper, looks better.

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C 22 years ago

I've always thought that the tile looked nicer. The previous owners had wood glued along the base and it looked horrible - not to mention that the corners were all chewed and chipped up.

Getting back to my original question -

After further investigation, it appears the builders, not the previous owners, put the tile on the drywall and then slicked it so it was flush. Have the same problem in the shower around the window.

Oh well, anything will be an improvement over what was there.

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C 22 years ago

Thanks for the info.

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Bathroom Tile Redo Nightmare

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