Tiling advice - remove old tiles or tile over

aquarius10

We built a new house 2 yrs ago and put wood effect floor tiles in our open plan kitchen / dining / sitting room but they are too dark and we want to change them.

The problem is the kitchen & Island is laid on top of them and the mess that will be made taking them up ?

The tiler who put the down said they won't come up easy but the sales man in tile shop has said they should come up easy enough with small kango ?

We plan to put down 60x30 porcelain tiles and need a level floor. Don't know what to do lay on top or try & take up tiles ?

Advice appreciated

volono

HI O.P. my advice would be to definitely take the old tiles up and as you've been advised a kango hammer with a spade bit will do the job.
As for the kitchen and island if you remove the kickboards from the kitchen it will allow access to tiles underneath the physical kitchen. Depending on who tiled it to begin with, underneath all the units is very very rarely tiled.
It's usually only tiled in 6 inches or so, this saves money on how many yards of tile and adhesive, grout you would have purchased the first time round.
As for the island from my understanding they are never actually physically 'planted to the floor'. If you get a screw gun and look inside the units the counter top will be screwed to the base, remove this and all drawers etc. and the base will be handy enough to move around.
I'm taking for granted that it's not a granite worktop of course, if so manpower and plenty of it will still allow you to move the whole island around.
As for removing the tiles yes there is definitely work involved and sometimes they 'pop' up off the floor a lot easier than others but depending on size two men should have it stripped in a couple of days at the very most.
When that's done the tiler will have to put floor levelling compound throughout, it looks like any other bag of adhesive but when mixed its like a fine smoothie I suppose, This is basically just spread all over the floor and finds its own 'level' so to speak and is lightly troweled on the floor and will dry overnight. it's then ready to tile. Hope this doesn't sound to complicated because it really isn't.

I couldn't see two men not finishing in a good week, and obviously if they know what they're doing they'll to it in sections so as to leave you access to front room etc.
The problem is that tiling over will create problems anyway as all doors will have to be removed and quite heavily planed I'd imagine to allow tiles to fit under them, same with all kickers in the kitchen and I'm guessing here but have you French doors leading out into the back garden?? how to tile into them??
I'd strongly advise removing the old and start anew, just think in the future if you decide to change again will you tile over again?? no chance and two layers of tile would certainly be hard work to remove and then you have large gaps at the bottom of all doors
If you borrow a kango and wheel barrow and remove all the old tile yourself it'd save quite a bit on labour , really not the most pleasant job but easy enough.
Well I hope this helps o.p. good luck with it.