Bathroom From HELL!! Please Help!

[Ryan Collins]

Hello All,

I'm a new member here at BP and I'm looking to turn my starter home into a rental to help parlay this into additional properties and my next home. I've had the house for 2 years now (hard to believe how fast time flies!). I originally bought it with the intention of fixing up some of the nuances of the home to add value and make a small profit and/or turn it into a rental. Now that I am getting older and I realize how much working everyday on someone else's schedule sucks I really want to build a nice rental portfolio so that is my main focus. However, to get started I must first get past this horrid bathroom.

Unfortunately, in my rush to get to work this morning I failed to snap a shot of the entire bathroom but I will post at a later time. I'm sure someone here has run into these type of bathrooms that I'm sure were probably the style of the times in the 70's but are absolutely hideous now. Long story short, I decided to finally go ahead and get this project out of the way but I'm running into a bit of a problem with the ceramic tile removal. As you can see in the picture the first several pink top tiles I was able to remove in a fairly clean way. However since then it's been a real headache! I went to pickup a multitool based upon the results I had seen from a few YouTube videos to cut out the grout and assist in cleanly removing each tile piece. The tool cut out the grout but it was very resistant, which I don't believe is very common. I think I had to go over the areas I was cutting about 4-5 times to make any headway on the blue tiles. The next issue was that once I began chiseling the tiles they began to crack and shatter. I'm not being heavy handed with the hammer either. So now the quick tile removal that I planned is taking a bit longer than expected.

I've talked with a few people and I was told there is no way around this cracking and to just go ahead and pulverize the tile and the cement backer board. But I've never even put up drywall let alone a new cement backer board so I'm kind of apprehensive about going that route. I was actually hoping to salvage what appears to be the current cement backer behind the tiles but with the cracking I'm not sure how possible this is. Basically, I'm looking for general overall guidance with these type of bathrooms. Anything will help. And sorry for the thesis term paper of an explaination.

Thanks!