Well......................project creep. Or maybe project huge leap. Just wanted to share my experience. Got to taking up some of the old tiles (9 x 9") I guess as I sort of expected, got this one up pretty easily, but it caused the 2 or 3 adjacent ones to get lose. So then those got their neighbors lose........you get the idea. So, as my wife and I pondered what to do, figured that by the time we got up the 75% or so that were lose, we'd break a couple, a few on the floor were cracked or chipped already , and no replacements were to be found. I had 4 spares. So we said, OK, let's go for it. My (proven to be well founded) concern was the tiled adjacent entry hall. Way back I had installed them with epoxy thinset and they were as tight as tight could be, none broken after 40 years. Seems the kitchen was done with some early days (1980's) thinset and it seemed to have just failed. By that I mean for the most part half the motar was stuck to the bottom of the tile and the other half of its thickness stuck to the plywood floor. They came up easy. But then the hall. The epoxy job was epic. Hammer, chisel...bang bang bang. Piece by piece. What I found worked best was using a brick hammer with a sharp face and a 2 lb hammer. That worked best. We got them all up in several hours (4' x 13' hall) Then back to finish the kitchen. A few years ago I did a repair job on some lose tiles in front of the sink. I figured they were lose because of the kick space heater blowing hot air onto them every winter. anyway, the repair job turned out to be too good. Using thinset from 5 years ago, man did it stick. Worse than the epoxy tiles. But we got them up.
I guess here is what I learned:
Easiest way I found was to use the brick hammer as a chisel and a 2 lb hammer.
You kind of need a helper to keep moving the lose crap out of your way to limit the mess, and have the shop vac there to get the fine stuff.
I had a floor fan blowing out the door to try to minimize dust in the house. Worked OK
Now to remove then thinset off the floor. I saw a device --- dust collector on YouTube a guy was using. Bought one for my 4 1/2" grinder. It was like $28 bucks on line . You can buy a brand name for 3 times the cost but I honestly don't know if it would work any better. You hook the sucker up to a shop vac and then is almost no dust. And the grinding wheel to buy is one of the Amazon choices. The Orange store got them for $80-100. $15 on Amazon and it works like a champ. I suppose if you are doing multiple floors maybe the costly wheel is a better choice but for one or two floors? $15 .....good deal. Only issue with the dust collector since its universal, more or less, you might have to futz with it a bit, but not a big deal for the price. Check them out on YouTube.
It seems we are going to go with a luxury vinyl plank floor. I guess I am out of energy to replace the ceramic/porcelain tile.
