How To Remove Old Thin Floor Tile

Masonry chisel and a 2 lb.

How to remove old thin floor tile.

Put on protective eye wear. Apply thin set mortar to the floor to make it level. Remove the mortar from the underlayment by hammering. Start at a broken tile or between tiles where the grout has loosened.

Floor tile might be fixed onto a cement or concrete surface in this case the surface doesn t damage easily and is ideal for using power tools to remove tiles quickly. Ceramic porcelain marble and mosaic tiles for walls and floors can be removed by hand with the aid of a chisel and small 2 lb sledgehammer for instance but this can be a tiring job and doing it this way is time consuming and very hard work. Apply muriatic acid directly to the back of a piece of tile if the mortar is particularly thick such as more than 1 8 inch. Wipe the tiles dry with a rag then scrub them again with the textured side of a kitchen sponge.

Work the chisel between the tiles and the concrete hammering them up with a 2 lb. Strike the face of stubborn tiles to break them up for easier removal. Once this first tile is removed place the chisel against the bottom edge of adjacent tiles apply pressure with your hammer and the tiles should pop up easily image 2. Remove a section of the thinset using the hammer and.

Use a paint brush and coat the mortar with pure acid. As it loosens the. If this doesn t get most of the mortar up it s probably going to be easier to replace the underlayment. To get dried thinset off the top of your tiles scrub away as much of it as you can with warm soapy water and a sponge.

Hammer on a 2 to 3 foot square section of the floor to smash up the remaining mortar and then use the floor scraper to scrape the broken pieces of mortar off the underlayment. Thin set mortar will help fill in the holes and uneven surfaces of the floor so that the removal of the tile and grout no longer looks bad. Thinset is used to install tile to concrete while adhesives and epoxies are used to install tile to wood subfloors. Apply a 0 125 in 0 32 cm layer of thin set mortar with a flat or square notched trowel depending on whether you ll be re tiling the floor.

If any stubborn traces are left you may need to gently chisel it away or sand it off with a rotary sander and 50 grit sanding disk.