We just bought a house and the bathroom tile looks terrible. Its not in bad shape, I just dont like the ugly floral pattern. Since we had to spend a lot of money on other projects in the house we dont have a lot to spend on re-tiling, The bathroom is small, about 5ftx4ft of floor, so I thought peelstick would be a good option. The tiles currently on the floor are peel and stick, should I remove them all before I apply the new ones? or can I just give them a good cleaning and lay the new tiles over them?
I agree that real tile can be nearly as cheap as peel and stick, but much more attractive. Its a lot harder work though! Peel the old ones up. I stuck sticky tile over old sticky tile in my laundry room and now the pattern of the old tile is starting to show through.
Removing the old ones is the correct way to go. Of course if this room doesn't receive much traffic, it would probably be ok to stick the new ones over the old ones. If you remove the old ones. Use an iron over wax paper on each tile to heat the glue up to remove. Then you will have to put a skim coat down to create new clean surface for the tiles to adhere to.
Don't use the conventional peel and stick, there's something better. Home Depot has some tiles or planks of vinyl which stick to each other but not the floor, nice patterns, good price and easy to do. All you need is a smooth surface, doesn't matter what kind, to place them on, and there is stuff called embossing leveler which will do that, and you use it to fill in the pattern on the old tiles to avoid what the previous poster mentioned of the old pattern showing through. I have this stuff in most of my house now and it's great.
If the old tiles are not embossed, you can put down new peel n stick with no need to remove the old ones. If they are embossed, you might want to sand the pattern down or pour on a leveler. And I've had peel n stick in both bathrooms for almost 20 years, and they still look as good as new. They were installed over asphalt tiles.
You are in for a long project if you try to pull those tiles up. If they are all firmly down (no corners peeling) it is going to be a chore to get them all up. They will not come off in even chunks. If you do decide to take this on, you might want to consider real tile after you pour a floor leveler down (vs trying to replace a new peel and stick on what will be an uneven surface.) My advice is for a quick fix, peel and stick over the current floor (off center the tiles from the ones down now). When you decide to do a more major overhaul, 2 layers of peel and stick tiles with not be any more difficult to remove than one layer. It's a quick fix and should work fine for you. I did both my laundry and basement peel and stick over existing peel and stick tiles 2 years ago--no problems in what is a moisture filled area. Clean the floor really well though with a vinegar and water solution. Good luck.
