There was nothing wrong with the fireplace, but we knew that pink tile would not match any of our stuff. After tearing up the carpet, we used hammers and crow bars to smash the floor tiles off. When we got to the surround, we realized that the tiles were affixed to dry wall, and almost accidentally pulled off a big hunk of the wall. In troubleshooting how we were going to get the tiles off without damaging the wall too much, we learned that giving them one good whack broke the tile, and the broken tile fell from the wall. There were only a couple places where the tile stuck and we had to pry it off, damaging the wall.
I tried to leave the pieces of the trim on, but eventually had to remove them to get all the tile off, and place the new tile. We bought large square tiles for the floor and glass mosaic tiles for the wall.
I wanted to get the floor tiles down so we could lay the main room flooring, but couldn't put up the wall tile until we repaired the holes left by the old tile. We should have just cut it out and replaced it, but we filled it in layer by layer instead. Waiting for each layer to dry took a day, so it was almost a week before it was done.
