tile wont come up

As you can tell from pictures of the kitchen the room was divided into two areas.  Although both areas had the same tile, removing the tile floor was very different in each area of the kitchen.  The side of the kitchen that had the appliances was relatively easy removing the tile.  The other side, however was tile removing hell!  It was nearly impossible to separate the tile from teh plywood subfloor.  Each tile smashed and splintered into tiny peices and hauled out in buckets.  Even after smashing the tile, the actual bottom portion of each tile remained in tact:

problems removing tiles

You can see the orange-ish tile and only a few spaces we were able to get to the actual subfloor.  Everywhere else is the bottom of the tile still stuck to the subfloor.

difficult tile removal

If you’ve ever had some problems removing floor tiles, you understand from these pictures that this was not a fun job.

We basically got it smashed down enough to expose the seams of the subfloor so that could be ripped up with the tile remnants still intact.

The two sections of the floor were different levels so one sheet of subfloor had to be removed from one half of the room.  Turns out these sheets were heavily glued, screwed, and nailed together.  More fun trying to rip them apart as they just shredded and splintered:

difficult tile removal

Due to a bow in the floor joists, there were ‘sister joists’ attached to each kitchen floor joist to level it out.  After discovering the sub floor issue we figured it was better to just rip it all out!

difficult tile removal

You can see that old hardwood floors were under the sub on one side.  Given it was only one side, they it wasn’t salvageable.