You need to remove your lower cabinets if you want your new floor to be level, and look right. I can't imagine being able to get a tile floor up without a great deal of difficulty as it's basically cemented down.

We had some damage to our kitchen floor about a year and a half so we decided to put down tile. My husband had to pull up two layers of flooring so we could start with a perfectly level surface. It took a couple of weeks just to get it up there were so many staples in it! Here's a picture of my husband using a brick and some of his thousands of tools to pry it up. We took out all the lower cabinets by the time we were done, and as you can see, there's almost no way to remove a floor without getting them out of the way.

One other thing to consider is that in order to remove the lower cabinets, the countertop needs to come up. My husband was confident that ours was just screwed down, and that he could easily get it up without ruining it. He got most of it up without too much trouble, but one piece had to be cut [it was laminate] so we ended up having to replace that as well as redo the floor.

Did you know you could have asked the builder to not install carpet or tile and give you a credit? A number of people had done it in the community I live 20 years ago. One person settled without any carpet in the whole house and they signed something that stated they had a very short time frame to install their own carpet before they were allowed to move in and prove it to the lender they had already chosen what they were to install. We went with the builders grade carpet and gave it 5 years knowing we wanted to install our own wood flooring when we could afford to do it and also had time to paint our walls without any worry of ruing floors.

I heard there is a way to have tile installed then place the cabinets on top, but not worry for future replacement of the floor and having to take up the cabinets again if you are not replacing them. I saw it online where you draw a line down on the floor to the edge of the cabinets, so when you place your subfloor, do it up to that line on both sides as if its a separate cut. Also end your tile up to that point and start a new tile on the other side of that line since it will all be hidden anyway. That way, you can take up the underlayment you put down to install the tile without ever having to worry about removing cabinets. I think we might do it that way once we install our new cabinets. Not because I plan to change my floor again, but if something ever happened that we had to, we could do it without any damage or removal of our kitchen base cabinets.

Take a multi tool and cut the tile through to the subfloor under the cabinets. The use an air chisel to remove. Not hard. Just filthy dirty and you've got to keep spritzing the tile down with a water bottle to help keep that dust under control.

Thank you all for the suggestions, and advice I've decided to suck it up for a while and live with the white tile :)

And @diyher they wouldn't leave just subfloor they claimed the town wouldn't allow it.

oh, under out cabinets there is just subfloor. We found out when the floor to our sink cabinet fell through. What I meant was the base floor that you can put on top of a sub plywood floor.