We had some cermic tiles lift after the earthquake last October and we are now planning to take up the rest of the tiles and replace them with an engineered Bamboo Flooring. What do we need to do to get the floor ready for the wood? Do we have to get all the mastic up and if we do what can we use? Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. Mahalo

Getting all the mastic would be nice but near impossible. I would cover the floor with 1/2" Hardibacker concrete sub floor, maybe you could get away with 1/4" if the old floor is stable. Glue and screw the Hardiboard per manufacturer instructions. You will end up with a nice flat surface.

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Originally Posted by Kona Chip

We had some cermic tiles lift after the earthquake last October and we are now planning to take up the rest of the tiles and replace them with an engineered Bamboo Flooring. What do we need to do to get the floor ready for the wood? Do we have to get all the mastic up and if we do what can we use? Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. Mahalo

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Thank you so much for your response ballengerb1. I will pass on your suggestion to my husband, but one thing I forgot to mention is that we are working on a concrete slab. Would we still be able to use the Hardibacker on that type of floor? We have thought about laying the flooring right over the tiles, but thought that might raise our floors up to high for the doors to clear.

If your floor is concrete id say not to use the hardibacker, for one you'll have to use mortar to attach it to the concrete and that's a job to do, if its contrete I would recommend takeing a large scraper and just getting the excess mortar up.. just curious how big your floor is? If you used hardi backer you still have to take a lot of the mortar up anyway,

Once its clean all id do is use the plastic and foam mat for those floors and that's it, just a vapor barrier is really on you need, I don't think you can avoid not removing the mortar,

Also is there any reason why you don't just replace the tiles you need to ?

Thank you for the suggestions. Looks like we have a lot of work ahead of us to get this floor ready to lay the bamboo flooring.
We were hoping there was a product out there that would help to loosen the old mastic to make it a little easier to remove.
As for why we are not just replacing the tiles there are a couple of reasons, one we can not get them here (Hawaii) anymore and two the original tile job was poorly done. We have a lot of grout out and many other tiles that you can hear are not attached to the floor. Either the mastic dried too fast or the tile person did not use enough. We did not have the tiles put in.
We would like to put the bamboo from the front door through the dining room to give the house a uniform look.
Again Mahalo for your help.