Removing tiles from gyprock....

My girlfriend and I just bought a house, so you're going to see me on here a lot over the coming months. The good news is the place has a double garage which will be my very own 6mx6m workshop. The bad news is that the place needs some work - nothing urgent, except for one thing..........

The master bedroom has mirror-tiles on the two walls in the corner of the room. It's looks very...um....er..... interesting and quite frankly it has to go. By the looks of it the mirror tiles were mounted on to the gyprock.

Any tips on the best way to get them off without damaging the plaster?

G'day

If they are glued on with liquid nails or similar it will be a hard job. First i would tape up the mirrows too stop the class shattering to much. Start from a edge and try to pop them off, if u r lucky all u will have left is a bit of glue on the plasterboard u can sand back, if u r not it will be very messy.

Like Dan says, tape them up and give one a go. But likely the best way to get them off and the least amount of trouble is probably to cut around them and remove the plasterboard completely and replace it.

Cheers
Michael

Cutting away is probably the best bet but we did something similar a while back by using an old hacksaw blade. Simply ground a sharp end to form a fine chisel and used that to slice through the double sided tape in this case. We were not worried about the plaster but wanted to save a large mirror in a bathroom reno before ripping the walls out.

John.

Thanks guys, some good tips there. I'll let you know how it goes. We're not moving in until late May 06 so if anyone has any other tips in the meantime, feel free to throw them at me.

Pete, maybe experiment (gently :) ) with a heat gun, whatever they were stuck on with may soften with heat.


Cheers.............Sean

Ok we finally got around to removing some of the mirror tiles, but not from the bedroom as mentioned in my first post. We decided instead to use the small 2m x 1m section of mirror tiles in the hallway as a trial.

Well, it didn't go too well. Heat didn't help. We taped up the tiles as suggested and that did a good job of containing the broken glass. We seemed to get best results by sliding a paint scraper behind the tiles and removing small sections at a time. Whoever attached the tiles used several different adhesives, some of which came off nicely, some of which were so strong it was impossible to get the tile off without taking away the paper from the gyprock.

The wall has enough paper missing that I'm inclined to cut that whole section of gyprock out and replace it with a new sheet as suggested by Johnc and mic-d. If I do a reasonable job on the hallway, I'll then do the bedroom in the same way. If I muck it up completely, it's only a small secton so a pro fix-up won't be too expensive.

Wish me luck.

You may be better off patching what is there rather than replacing a section of the sheet. Replacing a section can result in butt joins showing up if not filled out well. While skim coating over the area should produce a better job, if done right.

To do this job peel back as much of the loose paper as possible then give the whole area a thin skim coat. When dry, loose edges of the paper will swell from the moisture. Using the rounded handle of a scraper push the raised paper below the surface (or scrape off if there is too much). Give those areas a skim coat. Then 2nd coat the whole area. Repeat the process if any further ends of paper swell up. Then a top coat and sand back lightly.

This will give you a better repair job than replacing a section of sheet.

Cheers Rod Dyson

Thanks for the neat suggestion Rod. It made me go and stare at the wall for a few minutes and think about the best option. To be honest, I can't convince myself I'll be able to get the skim coat smooth enough. I might fluke it in the small section of hallway, but I can't see it happening in the larger walls of the main bedroom (2 walls of 2m x 4m).

I see your point about the butt joints. As It hapens, there's already a very visible butt joint in the area. It's so visible, I'm 99% sure I can get a "remove and replace" job to look better than what was there previously.

I guess that's what it comes down to for DIY - levels of confidence in your limited abilities :)

Plenty of help on the CSR website:2tsup: