Your chances of not damaging some splash tiles are not too good. Typically the splash would be set after the counter, which means the counter tiles go under the splash. If your tile was mud set, and metal lath was used, chances of damage are even greater because the lath may wrap up the wall and essentially make the splash and counter one continuos member.

Our countertops are cement board on top of a plywood base with the tile laid on top of that. Then, the wall tiles were done last. So, I should anticipate there is going to be a major likelihood of having to replace all of the blacksplash throughout my entire kitchen too?

Not sure this helps....a friend recently removed a laminate counter that had the 4" laminate backplash with tiles above it. It came out smoothly with no damage to the tile.

Can you try it yourself in one spot just to see how it goes?

No guarantees, of course, but I think you will likely be able to get the countertops out, but will ruin many of the tiles in the BOTTOM ROW of your backsplash. I wager you will be able to keep most of the ones above that row.

This does not strike me as a tragedy, because your new countertop is unlikely to be the same thickness as the one you are removing. We had a recent thread concerning just this situation: http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg0116332931532.html.

I would think about just planning to do a cute border between your new countertop and the rest of the BS.

...what Angie said, since your tile is on cement board, you should only possibly lose or damage some of the bottom row tiles. If this happens, one option is to take a Soapstone splash up as high as one course of tile and have the remaining tile splash sit on top of the thicker soapstone...

Thanks for all of your help and suggestions. I guess I hadn't thought about the possibility of doing a splash from the counter material and running it up to the tiles. I guess we won't know until we try, and I will have to prepare for all eventualities.

Piece of cake.
There should not be any damage to the backsplash, the contractors just covering his ass.

snoonyb--

I hope you are right and this is just a CYA move.

This is a case of if you really care about not damaging the tile, it's a DIY job. No one will care about your tile like you do. The typical demolition of tile counters doesn't involve being too careful about trying to save anything but the cabinets. You'll have enough issues with that. I recommend removing the doors and drawer fronts during the demo. Yes, that means removing all of the cabinet contents, but that's a GOOD thing! Everyone needs to go through their kitchen stuff and purge the unused items every so often.

hags & live wire--

Yes, I think more and more we are coming to realize that we will probably end up doing the demo ourselves. Thank you for some excellent ideas in how to approach this project. It is a good thing we consider ourselves pretty handy and have done many projects before. In fact, I am the one who installed all the backsplash tiles. I guess I had never even thought about the need to take everything out of the cabinets, but it was a promise to myself that I was going to go through and reorganize everything in the cupboards as a part of this project. Guess I just didn't realize that I should be typing it in to the counter renovagtion.