Flooring Tile - Removing ceramic tile floor

I am removing ceramic tile floor and installing a laminate. The powder room was a challenge, but I had removed all of the items so it was OK. Now, I have to do the hallway and kitchen.

I have two concerns. How do I handle the front doorway threshold? If I remove the tile and backer board it will result in a large gap between the bottom of the door and new flooring.

The second concern is my kitchen cabinets. They are relatively new and were installed in part on top of the ceramic tile, primarily the front edge, but the sitting area and stove are on top of tile. How can I cut the tile back to behind the toe kick and leave room for both a clean finished look once I install moulding and a stable surface for the cabinet? Is there a recommended cutting tool that will work in the very confined overhead space I have available to cut the tile up against the cabinet?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Joe

Remove ceramic? Oh the humanity!!! Any way, given your situation, I have to say your best bet in the kitchen is to install the laminate over top. Breaking the tiles out form under the cabinets is very difficult and getting out the cement board would be even trickier. Removing base cabinets isn't very hard if you wish to go to that extreme, which would be easier than trying to remove the cement board at the edge of the cabinet, but, once you break up the tile, then you could use a rotozip with the 3 1/2" dry diamond blade to cut through the cement board and then pry up. This will kick up tons of hazardous dust. I say Rotozip as a brand because the 4" diamond blades used on a regular angle grinder just won't get under that toe kick, and I don't think that there's an alternative, unless you can find a small enough masonry wheel to fit onto a rented toekick saw. Anyway, if you go over the ceramic then you can just transition to the other rooms with a hard surface reducer. If there is a tile or two in the field of the kitchen that are sticking up too far from the rest of the field, then chisel those tiles out and fill the void with floor leveler or thinset. Good luck.

Thank you for the response. I am still removing the tile from the hallway. What a mess. I am going to take your advice and install the laminate over the tile in the kitchen.

How do I handle uneven areas? What do you recommend I do with the transition between the kitchen and the carpete in the dining room and laminate in the hallway?

Thanks again.

Joe :)

If the laminate in the hall way is joining the laminate in the kitchen a hard surface reducer should do the trick. They normally snap into some sort of track and to glue it to the tile floor should be no problem with a polyurathane adhesive. For the carpet, you can use an oak transition strip that reduces down and will pinch the end of the carpet (make sure your tack strip is there at the door way) and will screw down into the wood subfloor at the edge of the tile. Come to think of it, you can use that at both ends, but mark your holes onto the hallway laminate and drill them larger than the screws so the floor can continue to float around the screws. You could also use a carpet reducer at the door way. With laminate a hard surface reducer slopes to the adjoining floor and a carpet reducer has a blunt nose on it and you either tuck the carpet allong it (not under) as you would around baseboards or roll the carpet over and staple it down flush up to the carpet reducer. As for unevenness in the tile floor, as long as the floor wi uneven within specs as set forth from the laminate manufacturers include instructions, then who cares. If you have a tile sticking up too high, bust it out and fill the void with any floor patching compound.