Kitchen and bathroom floors covered in new stone tiles can look absolutely gorgeous, but old, cracked tiles can look like a set of crooked, broken teeth. You don’t need to be latent architects or have sophisticated building skills to get rid of an old tiled floor; your DIY skills will suffice. It’s strangely gratifying, but while painting, decorating and plastering all require a degree of patience, you can just let rip on this one.
Arm yourself with a long-handled tile scraper, lever under a tile and push. If it won’t lift easily and it really is satisfying when it does, you might have to break the tile up with a club hammer, gentle taps will do the job. Generally, though, you’ll be able to slip that strong, broad blade through the grout and push through the adhesive, bang goes another tile.
Sadly, this is rarely the end of the story. You’ll almost certainly be left with clumps and splodges of adhesive residue. The best solution is to melt them into docile mush with a hot air gun and use a stripping knife as you go to scrape the mess away. If this works, all you need to do before laying your new floor covering is seal the area with a coat of diluted PVA. If you’re out of luck and the old adhesive is too stubborn to remove, your best bet is to cover the area with a layer of plywood or hardwood and get on with setting those new tiles. You’ll end up with a DIY job that looks like real property development.
Add A Comment