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bobtownsuz

Help with 1950s bathroom tile issues

bobtownsuz
2 years ago

I'm in the early stages of renovating a 1950s ranch home bathroom. It has original pink square wall tile and aqua hexagonal floor tile. The tile is in great shape, except for near the shower, where long term water leakage damaged the floor tile and has loosened some of the lower wall tile. The damaged floor tile near the shower was removed at some point by a previous owner and replaced/patch with bare cement. We want to do a bare bones reno to this bathroom (it's only 7 ft by 4 ft in size!) - redo the shower, replace vanity, paint the non-tiled portion of the walls. I'd like to keep the existing wall tile and replace the floor tile. My contractor tells me it is impossible to remove the floor tile without removing the wall tile, and also that the wall tile MUST be removed because there will surely be mold behind it. He also wants to gut the whole bathroom down to the studs - but the existing textured plaster walls above the wall tile are in good shape and I don't see why they can't be saved. So, my questions: can this floor tile be removed without having to remove all the wall tile? I'm guessing it goes underneath the bottom row of the wall tile, so would I have to lose that bottom row of wall tile, and if so, is it possible to do that without damaging all the rest of the tile? Should I just resign myself to giving up all the tile? And if so, should I just go ahead and let him gut all the walls? We are trying to save some money on this bathroom, but I don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish. I have added some pics of the tile, in the area where the floor tile meets the (good) wall tile and where the floor tile was replaced with cement.


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