How To Remove a Tile Floor

Are you ready to replace that old, outdated tile from your floors? Updating the floors in your kitchen, bathroom, or any room, can give you a dramatic improvement. I recently began a full DIY kitchen remodel. And I wanted to replace my old ceramic tile with luxury vinyl plank. Although taking up the old tile floor was easy by definition, it was hard work. But worth it to be able to give the kitchen a fresh new look. Here I’ll show you how to remove a tile floor for your next do it yourself project.

Safety First

If you’re looking for instructions on how to remove tile without breaking it, this is not it. You will break the tile with this method. With that you’ll have shards of tile, pieces of thin set, grout and other materials that are very sharp. Wear a good pair or work gloves and safety glasses. As well as a mask since you’ll be stirring up a lot of dust. Knee pads will be very helpful to you as well.

Before You Begin Removal

You’ll need to remove any baseboard, shoe molding and other floor trim from the walls first. Additionally, you’ll need to remove any existing floor transition pieces. Take floor registers off and put them away for now. If your cabinets have a toe kick over the existing tile, take that off too. Remove all furniture and accessories. Block off the doorways in plastic if you want to contain the dust. Cover cabinets and furniture with drop cloths. Turn off your HVAC system, if you can, so you don’t circulate the dust through your home.

Remove The Tile

The tile I’m removing from my kitchen is ceramic. It’s installed using thin set over cement backerboard. The backerboard was then nailed down to a plywood subfloor. I knew this before I started. You can find out how your floor is attached by removing your floor register vent and taking a peek.

Using a drilling hammer and a 42″ prybar, begin the removal. Start by hammering in to one tile to shatter it, then pry that out. After you have your first piece out, you can continue out from there by hammering the prybar underneath the tile and backerboard. Once you have the prybar wedged a few inches under the materials, you can pry it up by lifting on the prybar.

Lucky for me, the backerboard was attached to the subfloor using nails. This made it easy to remove as I could pry it all up taking the nails out with it. If your backerboard is glued down to the subfloor, you can still pry it all up, but the subfloor may incur damage in that process. So be aware you may need to replace some sections of your subfloor if that happens.

After you work the materials up, place them in demo bags to take out of your home. You can buy a Bagster bag to contain all of your demo bags and other debris. Then schedule a pick up with Bagster. They’ll come out and pick up the entire bag within a few days. The Bagster was about half the price of renting the smallest construction dumpster I could find.

And that’s how to remove a tile floor, easily. It does take a little muscle and sweat to do this DIY project. But in the end you’ll save a lot of money doing it yourself.

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