Replacing Kitchen Floor Tiles: Removing Old Vinyl or Quarry Tiles and Starting Right

Replacing a kitchen floor properly means taking the old floor covering out, not burying it. Old vinyl and its adhesive will not hold new tiles, and tiling over quarry tiles or an existing tiled floor raises the level enough to cause trouble at thresholds and under appliances. Strip it back, fix the substrate, then tile once on a sound base: that is the whole method, and the strip-out and preparation are where the real money and the real quality live.

Key takeaways

• Vinyl and its adhesive always come off. No tile adhesive bonds reliably to old vinyl or bitumen residue.
• Quarry tiles can sometimes be tiled over, but hollow spots, cracks or bitumen underneath mean strip-out.
• Floor height matters in a kitchen: thresholds, plinths and the gap under fitted appliances all move if the level changes.
• The substrate work after strip-out (levelling, priming, decoupling) decides whether the new floor lasts.
• Compare quotes on the written specification, not the headline figure. Removal and prep are where cheap quotes cut.

A herringbone porcelain kitchen floor laid on a stripped, levelled and primed base. The pattern is what you see; the preparation underneath is what keeps it flat and crack-free. Kitchen floor tiling service

Can you tile over old vinyl or quarry tiles instead of removing them?

Over vinyl, no. It does not matter how flat or well-stuck it looks: vinyl is a flexible sheet designed to move, and tile adhesive needs a rigid, absorbent or primed mineral surface to grip. Tiles laid over vinyl debond, and the adhesive underneath the vinyl fails long before that anyway. The vinyl and its adhesive both come out, every time.

Over quarry tiles or an old ceramic floor, occasionally yes, and I cover the general rules in can you tile over existing tiles. But a kitchen stacks the odds against it. The old floor must be solidly bonded across its whole area (tap it: hollow notes mean no), and the added height has consequences a bathroom rarely has: external and internal door thresholds, the plinth line of fitted units, and the fixed gap under a dishwasher or washing machine that was built around the old floor level. I have been called to kitchens where an overlaid floor left the washing machine trapped under the worktop. Strip-out avoids all of it.

What does removing an old kitchen floor actually involve?

It depends what is down there, and in the 1930s semis I work on around Bexleyheath and Welling you often find several generations of floor stacked up: vinyl over hardboard over quarry tiles over the original sand and cement screed.

Vinyl and sheet flooring strips fast, but the adhesive residue is the real job. Modern acrylic adhesive scrapes and grinds back. Older black bitumen adhesive is a different matter: standard levelling compounds and adhesives will not bond to it, so it is either mechanically removed or primed and encapsulated with a levelling compound whose manufacturer explicitly permits it (the datasheet, not the merchant’s counter, is the authority). A quote that never mentions adhesive residue is a quote written without looking.

Quarry tiles are heavy, well-bonded and slow to lift, which is why removal features so heavily in the price. Underneath you find either a sound screed, a screed that comes up in lumps with the tiles, or bitumen again. Nobody knows which until the first tiles are up, which is why an honest quote states its assumption and what happens if the floor tells a different story. More on how strip-out is handled and priced in do tilers remove old tiles.

Hardboard and ply layers over floorboards come out too, back to the boards, so the new build-up can be done properly. Tiling a timber kitchen floor has its own rules, covered in tiling onto floorboards.

What needs to happen before the new tiles go down?

Strip-out exposes the truth about the substrate, and the preparation stage deals with it:

1. Assess and repair. Cracks in a concrete screed get raked out and repaired; on timber, loose boards are fixed and the floor stiffened or overboarded with tile backer.
2. Level it. Old kitchen floors are rarely flat, and large format tiles are unforgiving of a floor that is not. A primed, self-levelling compound brings the floor to the flatness the tile size demands. Why this stage is non-negotiable is covered in do you need to level a floor before tiling.
3. Decouple where the substrate calls for it. On a screed of unknown age, a floor with mixed substrates, or timber, an uncoupling membrane such as Schluter Ditra separates the tile bed from movement below. It is cheap insurance against the cracked tiles that follow a moving substrate.
4. Set out and fix with the right adhesive. A C2 cementitious adhesive as a minimum for porcelain, solid beds under every tile, and movement joints at the perimeter and wherever the substrate changes, for example where an extension slab meets the original floor. That junction is exactly where open-plan kitchen floors crack when it is skipped, which I cover in tiling an open-plan kitchen floor.

None of this shows in the finished photographs, and all of it is where a cheap quote quietly saves its money.

What decides the cost of replacing a kitchen floor?

Not the tiles, mostly. The drivers are what has to come out and what the exposed floor needs: the number of layers in the strip-out, whether bitumen turns up, how far out of level the base is, whether decoupling is needed, and the tile format going down. Access and waste disposal play a part too; several hundred kilos of quarry tile and screed has to leave the property somehow.

This is why a real price needs a site visit and comes as a written specification that itemises removal, preparation, materials and setting out. Two quotes that differ sharply are almost never pricing the same job: one of them has left the preparation out, and you will pay for it later either way. Use the tiling quote checklist to compare like with like.

Replacing kitchen floors in Bexleyheath and South East London

The interwar housing around Bexleyheath is classic territory for this job: original quarry-tiled kitchens and sculleries, later covered with vinyl or laminate, now being opened up into bigger kitchen-diners with a new porcelain floor throughout. These floors nearly always carry the layered history described above, and they reward being stripped back and rebuilt once, properly. You can read how I approach the work locally on my kitchen floor tiling in Bexleyheath page.

If your kitchen floor is due for replacement, do not accept a price over the phone and do not let anyone tile over vinyl. Get in touch and I will look at what is actually down there and give you a written specification for taking it out and doing the new floor right.

See: do tilers remove old tiles | do you need to level a floor before tiling | kitchen floor tile guide