"Zipadee Doodar" wrote in message
.uk...
Plumber finally came yesterday and stripped out entire bathroom, leaving
me a
clear field to remove old tiles before he returns on Monday to fit the new
stuff. We wanted to get rid of the floor to ceiling 6 inch square white
tiles and replace just to dado height apart from round the shower area,
plastering or arstecing above the dado. All the tiles are off now,
revealing
a layer of.....floor to ceiling 6 inch off white tiles These are rock
solid, and I don't want to hack them off, in case the wall plaster beneath
comes apart, setting the whole job back by weeks while I get a plasterer
in.
A quick confab with wife, and here is the plan: put new tiles as planned,
but over old, solid tiles. The question is, above my new tiles, above dado
height, is it feasible to skim coat, or arstec over the old tiles? Does
arstec stick to tiling?

We have waited the best part of a year to get this job on the go (let down
by several plumbers) so I don't want this to set us back any more. Any
advice much appreciated.

We installed a power shower and found our bathroom tiles started falling
off..
...only to reveal a second set underneath. Tiler at that time said it was OK
to tile
over the tile layer underneath - he would use a strong waterproof adhesive
and
the second layer of tiles wouldn't come off. He said that in all probability
stripping
the base tile layer would probably mean replastering. We reluctantly went
with his
advice.

A mere 14 or so years later, he was right. The tiles didn't come off. The
only nuisance
value has been that with a second layer of tiles, clearance can be a problem
since the
walls now encroach further over the bath. We had to take care over our
choice of
taps otherwise the bath taps would have been unusable because of the
proximity
of the tiles. If you have a choice I wouldn't do it, though we did and
generally it
worked out OK.

Winding forward to the present, the bathroom is being completely refitted.
Once gain tiling
rears it's head and I was determined to get rid of both tile layers - even
if the walls needed
complete replastering over the brickwork. I decided to try and remove the
tiles and see
if I could save the plaster.

Wickes sell a scraping knife which has a steel cap to the handle so that you
can use a
hammer on it. The scraper is heavy duty - slightly thicker and stronger than
the general
wallpaper scrapers they sell. It costs about £5. Using this and some care I
successfully
removed both layers (one at a time) keeping the plaster largely intact. The
problem you
may have is that you will still have an uneven surface from tile cement so I
guess it would
need to be sanded. In our case our porcelain tiles required almost perfect
walls and a thin layer of
adhesive so in the end we had the walls skimmed - it took about a week to go
off.

So there you have it - we've done it both ways. One caveat though. When I
was stripping
the base tile layer where the 'falling tiles' problem had occurred because
of the power shower, the
tiles almost fell away from the wall, making me think we'd been luck having
a very thick
second layer of tiles with a strong adhesive. I think the adhesive bond
between tile layers
is all that was holding things up in that area.

About your plumber. Our bathroom wall skim effectively halted work for ten
days. The
plumber/tiler/electrician have just gone on to other work and return to
finish off this week,
so I guess a delay is fairly normal. We waited seven months to get the job
started and to
their credit they've taken things in their stride. The last bathroom work
lasted 14 years and
I won't rush this one if it means we risk having tiles falling off, etc.
because we hurry too much.
We've not had a functional bathroom for about three weeks now. Fortunately
the neighbours
are friendly (or they just couldn't stand the smell ;-)

Good luck.

Paul
ZD