Hi,

Hope someone there has some suggestions to help me with this.

I have a house that was built in the 50's. It has 1" square white
ceramic tile on the bathroom floors with white grout. The tile is in
relatively good condition but I hate the color and size (impossible to
keep the tile and grout looking clean for more than a few minutes) and
I'm also expanding the bathroom by a few square feet so there's
currently no tile in that area. There is also some floor damage under
an area of tile which may need replacement so I need to get a good look
at it.

When I attempted to remove the old tile, it seems to be set in about
1/4" of concrete and below that is another 1/2" or more of a sand-like
substance, with a metal lathe/grid running right through the middle of
the depth of the "sand". (I'm not sure if this is real sand or if it
was something else 50 years ago and has just degraded over time.)

This is making it very difficult to clean out the area throughly and
I'm not really sure the best way to go about the demolition. It took
me about an hour with a hammer and chisel to clear a square foot of
tile, and I still have a lot of the sand-like substance under the metal
gridwork that I can't clean out very well. A shop vac gets the loose
stuff, but there are small chunks of compressed "sand" under the grid
that I can't get up.

I haven't even made it down to the subfloor so I'm not sure what I'll
find. The bathroom showers are tiled in a strange manner which makes
me very nervous about the floors. They appear to be tiled directly to
a metal grid which is attached to the studs, no true wall between the
tile and studs. I'm wondering if the bathroom floor is going to turn
out to be the same way.

Has anyone seen this type of floor tiling before? Better yet, has
anyone ever removed this type of tile? (If so, what are my chances of
getting all this tile removed during my lifetime and do you have any
advice?)

Please post a reply or e-mail me at erikabartlett-AT-bellsouth.net
(replace -AT- with @ to foil spammers). The address I use for google
is a throwaway one due to spam.

Thanks!

Erika