My bathroom tile job in the Northeast Heights turned into a two month project

Everyone says to just pull the old tile and go, but my 1960s house had three layers of mortar underneath that fought me every step. I spent a full week just on demo with a rotary hammer. Has anyone else found a better way to deal with that old multi-layer mud bed?

3 comments

3 Comments

maryp181mo ago

Honestly, that rotary hammer is a lifesaver but it's brutal work. What finally saved my back was scoring the old mud bed into smaller sections with a diamond blade on a grinder first. Breaking it up into like 2-foot squares made the demo way more manageable with the hammer. Still took forever, but at least it wasn't one solid slab fighting me.

barbara_hall98d ago

My uncle did a mud bed demo last year and he used a garden sprayer to mist the air while he cut. It cut the dust down by maybe half, which isn't perfect but it helped him see the lines. He said the trick was to just use a light spray, not a soaking stream. That whole project took him three weekends and he still talks about how sore he was.

dylan_rodriguez1mo ago

Two foot squares, @maryp18? That's some serious patience right there. I tried that once and gave up after the first line because the dust was just unreal, like a total whiteout in the bathroom. I can't imagine scoring a whole floor that way, my arms would be jelly from holding the grinder. You must have gone through a stack of those diamond blades.