Removing Old Tile Counters and Their Mud Beds
Plenty of kitchens in the Lakewood Park tracts still have ceramic tile counters, either the originals or a replacement laid the same way in the 1970s. Homeowners price the new surface carefully and treat the tear out as a line item that will sort itself out. It rarely does.
What Sits Under the Tile
Tile of that era was set in a mortar bed, usually called a mud bed, poured in place on site. The builder laid a plywood or board deck across the cabinet tops, covered it with felt as a slip sheet, stapled expanded metal lath over the felt, then floated roughly an inch to an inch and a half of sand and cement across the wire and screeded it flat. The tile went onto that bed. The result is a rigid slab spanning the whole cabinet run, keyed to the wire, which is itself fastened to the deck and often to the cabinet rails. None of it was designed to come apart again.
The Weight and the Debris
An inch and a quarter of mortar runs somewhere near fourteen to sixteen pounds per square foot before you count the tile. A modest thirty square foot galley run is therefore four hundred pounds and up of material that has to leave the house by hand. It comes out in irregular chunks rather than sheets, because the wire holds broken pieces together in slabs that then have to be cut or snapped smaller to fit through a doorway. Plan for a bin or a truck bed rather than a few contractor bags, and settle in advance where the debris will sit if the crew arrives before the container does.
Damage Risk to the Cabinet Faces and Boxes
The lath is fastened into the deck and the mortar has usually keyed itself into every gap around the sink cutout and the backsplash return. Levering that up transfers force straight into face frames that were thin when new and are now seventy years old, often nailed rather than screwed. The damage that shows up: split face frame rails at the front edge, torn cabinet tops, blown out corners where a stile meets the deck, and cracked plaster where a mortar backsplash was pulled instead of cut free. A crew that scores the field into manageable sections first does noticeably less of this than one that starts with a pry bar at the end of the run.
Whether the Cabinet Tops Survive
Ask before work starts whether the deck is coming out with the mortar, because in most of these kitchens it has to. Once the staples are pulled and the felt is torn, the plywood is damaged, often water stained under the sink, and rarely flat enough to save. Stone and quartz do not need a deck anyway: they sit on the cabinet rails with shims. What matters is that the rails are level, sound and in plane once demolition is done, and that any rail split during the tear out is repaired before anyone templates.
Dust and Containment
Cutting mortar and lath produces silica dust, and in an open plan house it travels everywhere within minutes. Reasonable practice is plastic sheeting over the openings, a fan pulling air out through a window rather than pushing it through the room, and a vacuum attached to the saw or grinder instead of a broom afterward. Ask whether the crew is cutting dry or wet, and where the water goes if wet. In an occupied house with someone home during the day, the difference between a contained tear out and an uncontained one is a week of grit on every surface you own.
How the Cost Compares to Lifting Off Laminate
A laminate top is screwed to the cabinets from underneath and two people usually have it out in under an hour, with the debris fitting in a pickup. A mud bed run is closer to a half day for two, plus blade wear, plus haul away priced by weight rather than volume, plus whatever cabinet repair the demolition uncovers. Expect the removal line to be several times the laminate figure and to be quoted as a range, because nobody knows how a given bed was built until the first section is off. Get disposal stated as its own number: weight based dump fees are the part that most often turns up after the fact.