Chuck Guzis wrote:
Do you live in house built on a concrete slab
foundation, with the
tiles attached to the slab? It sounds as if you do. The remedy is
to take all of the tiles up, Clean (and patch if necessary) the
slab, seal it (probably wasn't done originally) and go from there
with the proper mortar for the tile. You might as well buy new tile
while you're at it, since you're not going to get all of the original
tiles up in one piece anyway.
I believe this is the case, but can't verify yet as I've not been able
to pry a tile out fully. If I can fix the two or three that are rising,
I'll be happy, if not, if it turns out I'll have to redo the whole
kitchen floor, I'll get a contractor. At that point, it wouldn't be
worth the effort involved to do the whole floor myself and possibly
getting it wrong and having to redo it a year later, or whatever.
There was a lot of weird stuff with this house. A few years ago, the
wooden floor tiles in another area started to peel off, they turned out
to be humidity sensitive, and they were very thin - maybe 1/4th inch or
something glued to each other in patterns. There was no wood underneath
them as you'd expect. Instead, someone installed them ontop of a
previous vinyl floor. So we paid a guy to redo it, and it's much better
now. So maybe this will turn out that way also... But I'll keep
scraping around the grout and wiggling when I'm over the flu and see if
I can pry one off.