At Least it Turned Out OK

Sparkly tiles. After three days of sputter and stop work I completed an "easy" tiling project. It started with a loose couple tiles and ended with a better looking wall. Thank goodness the wife was out of town for the week or the lack of a tub and shower would have caused tremendous grief.

One Loose Tile

After chiseling out the first tile being extremely careful and slowly removing the grout to make a little room so as not to create undo pressure and crack surrounding tiles as soon as I got one off the rest of the tiles in this space practically jumped off the wall by themselves. Luckily I had placed a towel down in the tub or I could have had a chipped tub as well as broken tiles. After removing the tiles I used a utility knife to scrape most of the remaining grout off their edges any left would be buried by new grout. I also scraped off all the old tile adhesive which came off much easier than one would expect. Of course it was wet and probably had been for longer than I would like to admit.

Give your bathroom moisture and time and see what happens

After getting the tiles off I came to realize why it felt like there was a bubble between the backer board and the tile. Because there was a space as the tile was not attached to the wall. Behind the tile was wet adhesive and some mold. a scraper got off the adhesive and a little sponged on bleach killed the mold. I let the wall dry for a day with nothing on it.
I also had a fan blowing on it. As i wanted a dry flat surface to start the adhesive layer.

Ugh Put spacer in, take spacers out

well never having tiled a bathroom wall before I thought i would just buy what looked like the size of the grout line spacers. Well not until the end of my first run of tiles did I realize there were no spacers. and no space to fit it the last tile. From past experience with adhesives I have learned not to buy quick drying if you don't know if you will be tearing it back out so a half hour of semi precision tile and spacer laying was wasted. But at least i found out putting a little adhesive on the back of the tile makes it stick to the wall adhesive a heck of a lot easier.