Designing Kitchens and Bathrooms - remove tile or cover it?

All three bathrooms have unattractive tile on the wall (up 4 ft from floor). The tile is old and unattractive. I am thinking about installing wainscoating in one of the bathrooms and ideally I would like to install it over the exsisting tile.
So, question 1-
Can I install over the tile? It so, how would I secure it through the tile and into the studs.
Question 2-
If going over the tile is not the best way to do it, how would I remove the tile doing the least amount of damage to the wall underneath?

you can tile over tile using te proper bonding agent.I would use thinset mortar made for going over existing tile cause mastic would never dry.
No need to worry about attaching to the studs cause you will adheare to the tile.
Get an over sized "mud cap" for the top row of tile where it meets the wall. first try to get some of this tile off the wall to see how well it is attached cause you don't want this tile to fall off the wall while trying to stick the new tile on.If firmly attached the proceed:cool:

not sure if i understand the question right but to me wainscoating is usually wood. if im right what i would do is run approximatles 3 strips of 1x4 diagionally on wall one at top and bottom and middles and drill and attach this with screws and then just nail on wainscoating as usual

I am looking at using the pressed wood wainscoating that comes in the 4x8 sheets, I would then paint it to prevent the steam from getting directly to the wood. It would only be on the walls not in the shower area. I don't think 'framing' is going to work since it would push it out too far. Could I use a heavy duty apoxy and just stick it to the tile then add molding at top and bottom??

sorry i misunderstood the question,yea you could take something that would not soak into the wood and warp and or distort it and that would dry over the tile as well,i dont know what that would be though epoxy may work but do the homework first.
If you dont mind i'll move this over to the bathroom section and see if doug or someone knows the answer to this one:cool:

Think I'd use the liquid nails for doing shower surrounds for this application. Clean the area thoroughally first with a mild tsp solution & allow to dry prior to proceeding.

Generally speaking, can you give me an idea of what I would find if we decided to remove the tile? If we could remove it without having to go down to the studs we would do it, but I have never removed tile before and I have no idea how hard it would be or what we would find underneath...

No way to know that answer w/o trying to remove the tile. If it's pretty old, I'd just about lay $$ down that it's set with thinset on a mud & lath wall. If that's the case, it'll be tough going to remove it, we're talking hammer & chisel or jackhammer tough.

On the other hand, could be cheap tile stuck up there with mastic, 1/2 a day with a gooc scraper & it's all laying in a pile on the floor.

Only way to know is to give it a try.

I do think you could glue the wood over the tile using the liquid nails and trim the top with some sort of moulding.

I'm in the process of doing the same thing. I chose to remove the tiles. Mainly because they were ugly :-), but they were also already covering a layer of "something".
My tiles came off very easily using a small flat metal "cat's paw" and a hammer for encouragement. They popped off surprisingly easy so I guess I got lucky?
The whole removal process took about an hour. During the removal, I found out that the previous owner had put up a sheet of drywall over a previous mastic mess. Apparently there were tiles up originally and they simply installed drywall and tiled to it.

My original wall, once I got to it, is cement board and my plan is to install beadboard right to it with some liquid nails.