I heartily sympathise. When we moved into our current house, we didn't like the tiles in the bathroom - horrible black & yellow.

So we took them up.....and the blue tiles underneath....AND the pale green tiles under that. And finally, the floral and white tiles under these.

Four layers of tiles.....! It was less redecoration, more archaeology.

On the plus side, our bathroom was bigger afterwards.

Tradesmen never think of maintenance or the man who comes after, they focus solely on getting the job done asap.

A friend of mine had a new house built for him, beautiful tongue-and-groove floors were laid in the bedrooms...but the heating engineer hadn't been by then, and he needed access to install the heating pipes.

So he tore up the brand new flooring with a crowbar. And on being asked to pay to repair the damage, simply disappeared.

Moral - do it yourself.

I once helped some friends to strip the floor boards out of a house that was about to be bulldozed. The house was about 120 years old, and the boards had become absolutely stuck together with the passage of time.

Yes, they splintered when we tried to remove them with a crowbar. We found the best solution was to run around the walls with a chainsaw, and to then run the chainsaw along the floor in order to take it out in six foot wide swathes. Once we had the sections outside, we could knock them apart and extract each floorboard for use in a house we were building.

So avoiding glue is not a bad idea.