Old thin-set adhesive is crunchy!

It's a bit irritating to walk on it... But then again maybe if we keep it up we will be spared having to scrape the whole mess up. I sweep up copious amounts daily .... so at this rate we could have a smooth concrete subfloor by the end of the month...

We finished pulling up the tile in the kitchen by Monday night. It wasn't until I thought it all was gone that I realized it might have been a good idea to take a 'before' picture to serve as an explanation for demolishing the stuff. Thankfully, I had forgotten about the kitchen pantry and was able to take a few pictures there before Dave chipped it out.
After eight months of mopping and scrubbing -- the tile and grout were both still horribly discoloured. We have searched all over the internet for a possible explanation for what happened to our stone tile -- only to become more puzzled when resource after resource stated that stone floors were almost completely 'flood proof' -- particularly when installed over a concrete subfloor (we learned quickly that the floor was not actually laid over the linoleum as we had previously believed). Yes - several sources did mention that a poorly laid floor might suffer from adhesive breakdown and deterioration of the grout after a good, long-term flooding.
We had some of that -- loose tiles, crumbling grout, and large visible cracks running for several feet at a time along the most used areas of the kitchen.... But... Nothing explains the discolouration.

We learned all about 'efflourescence' when laying our Saltillo floor... and I did recognize some of the white haze and badly bleached grout to be a symptom of this happening in the concrete beneath the floor... But what about the pink tiles? the orange tiles? the yellowish tiles?

The biggest mystery is still the breakdown of the tiles themselves. In several areas the stone simply flaked into tiny bits off the surface of the tile... underneath the remaining tile crumbled into dust. The more we ran into this while pulling up the floor -- the more we began to realize just why our mop water was always so filthy no matter how many times we cleaned: we were literally mopping up the tile and grout.

I suppose we'll never know. But I did have to note that all of those resources about cleaning up after a flood continuously refer to 'rainwater' or 'clean floodwater' (I didn't know there was a such thing). I'm quite sure that what was in our house that day was neither of those...

The good news is that the tile in our bathrooms -- glazed ceramic tile -- did not suffer the same damage. The grout will need to be repaired, recolored, and resealed of course -- but anything's better than the prospect of ripping out another floor entirely.