Today I hired a Stripper!

Not exactly what you had in mind right. I am finally getting to replace my kitchen tile. This is something I have wanted to do since I moved into this house 8 years ago. The light gray, almost white tile has been hard to keep clean, and just overall ugly. Many a bad thought have been thrown at this floor over the years, but none so much as today. That tile would not come up, that soon became evident after a quick shot with my hammer and chisel. So I went out and rented a floor stripper. This had a large sharp blade that hammered against the tile. Did it work not really, so I took it back and rented a power chisel. This was a big chisel powered by a large air compressor. This did a better job of getting up the tile, though very slowly. The problem lay in trying to get up the existing mortar and wire mesh. I was told I needed to get down to the wood subfloor. And so I tried. A friend of my brothers was going to come help on Saturday, so I worked two days on my own trying to get the tile up. By Saturday I knew the mortar was not coming up. In fact my tile guy said he had never seen tile so hard to get up. So we resolved to leave it on and level it off with another layer of mortar. That took up Saturday. The next day my brother's friend came back with a buddy and got it laid. They did a good job and I was glad not to have to do it all by myself. Especially now that I know how much work I had left. So part two of the floor saga later.