Removing Tiles

Just plaster or tile over them. Paint with pva as a prep.

Michael Mcneil said

I wonder if there is a record for the number of layers of paper or tiles found in a house?

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 03:20:21 +0100, in uk.d-i-y Freda strung together this:

I'm pretty sure there is. I have absolutely no idea what it may be though.

Lurch said

I have this mental image of a house getting smaller and smaller, with a bathroom that is about 2 foot square. :-)

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 03:45:38 +0100, in uk.d-i-y Freda strung together this:

With the top 12" of the door trimmed off to accomodate the repeated overboarding\papering of the ceiling..... I was recently at a mates house fitting a new fireplace and in order to do this the carpet needed removing to accomodate the hearth. By the time I'd cut through 2 layers of thick carpet, 1 layer of cheap cord and a layer of underlay the hearth was lower than the top of the carpet! I'd always wondered why you had to step up from the dining into the lounge through the arch. ;-)

that was one of our options but the tiles only go half way up the wall and i think we want to re-tile the whole wall - so i suppose we would have to plaster the rest of the wall first then tile over ?? sounded a bit silly so decided to remove them?

Hi Miniemma,

I faced this dilemma a couple of weeks ago because like you I have been refurbishing my bathroom. Personally, I would remove the old tiles. I too had to choose whether to tile over the existing ones or start from new. The thing I didn't like was that the previous tiles were only about 3 high (there was just a bath, no shower) and one high around the window. Therefore, if I was to tile over the existing ones I would have been left with a small ledge two tiles deep, plus for the bath area I would have had to fix ply down to make the 3-4mm gap between existing tiles and wall.

When it came to de-tiling the wall everything went very well for the first half of the job (feeling pretty good about myself) THEN... like you said the plasterboard came away with the tiles and left with breeze block. So I jumped in the car and went to Travis Perkins where I got hold of a small bag of plaster. I've never done any plastering before but it doesn't really matter as you don't need a completely smooth paint finish. If you put too much on just sand down the excess. Despite it taking a lot longer than tiling over it looks much better and personally I think the tiling is probably the most important job in the bathroom as it's what gives you the overall impression of the bathroom.

Cheers!!!

bathrooms.....

Isn't this a typical woman's attitude? When you leave do you take an impression of the bathroom in wax or plaster? I bet she's got lampshades on all her lights too.

Before remodeling, our old bathroom was also tiled on the lower half only. The tile layer attached thin plasterboard to the upper half of the walls and then tiled the entire bathroom, up to the ceiling.

that's a good point, thank you, of course it doesn't have to look good if we are just going to tile over it again !! :-)

We faced this problem recently and a tiler recommended getting the really cheap B & Q white tiles to cover the untiled plasterboard to level the wall then tile over the old and new. It worked really well.

Snip your posts please also if you are going to top post let us have some idea what you are replying to somehow else would you?

An SDS chisel gets the tiles off easily. Go in at a narrow angle to the wall. The tiles ping off whole, with minimal damage to wall or tile (until tile hits floor...) Any other method I've tried, including cold chisel and hammer results in massive damage to plaster and tiny slivers of tile.

Christian.

thank you very much :-)