Saffron Walden Archives - North Essex Tile Doctor

Encaustic Tiled Bathroom Floor Renovation Saffron Walden

Encaustic Tiled Bathroom – Saffron Walden, Essex

This modern Encaustic tiled floor had been laid in the bathroom of a house in Saffron Walden about a year prior to my visit. It was now beginning to mark easily and its appearance had diminished, additionally my customer was finding it hard to keep clean. All these issues are classic symptoms of the sealer wearing down, so I recommended giving the floor a deep clean with burnishing pads and then resealing. It was only a small floor so the process should only take a day.

Encaustic Tiled Bathroom Floor Before Cleaning Saffron Walden

Modern Encaustic tiles are very popular these days due to the spectacular colours and patterns available and they do look great in smaller areas such as bathrooms. Many varieties do require you to maintain the sealer though and this requirement is often overlooked when being sold. This is not usually a problem when used to create a wall feature, however when installed on a floor you can expect the sealer to wear down with foot traffic. Once the sealer wears down it allows dirt to become ingrained in the tile and this becomes difficult to remove, thereby making the floor difficult to keep clean.

Another problem we find with sealed tiles in bathrooms and kitchens is the use of bleach-based cleaning products, the products are very strong and will quickly erode the sealer with regular use leaving the tiles vulnerable. This is why we always recommend the use of pH neutral tile maintenance products such as Tile Doctor Neutral Tile Cleaner.

Cleaning an Encaustic Tiled Bathroom Floor

To resolve the problem, I started with the application of a coarse 400-grit burnishing pad fitted to a rotary machine and lubricated with water. The floor was just big enough to squeeze the buffer machine in, and it made quick work of removing what was left of the old sealer and ingrained dirt. After a rinse with more water, the soiling was extracted with a wet vacuum and I repeated the process with the 800 and 1500-grit pads, rinsing and extracting after each pad. These pads gradually refine the tile and slowly build-up a polish on its surface.

Finally, I moved onto the very fine 3000-grit pad which is applied with only a mist of water sprayed onto the surface to bring up the final polished appearance. This last pad has the added advantage of leaving the tiles fairly dry, however, just to be sure I installed a couple of down blowers to fully dry out the floor before sealing.

Sealing an Encaustic Tiled Bathroom Floor

The blowers worked well, and I was able to seal the floor later that day using four coats of Tile Doctor Colour Grow using around a litre of sealer. This is an impregnating sealer that works by soaking into the tiles, where it occupies the pores to prevent dirt from becoming ingrained there.

Encaustic Tiled Bathroom Floor After Cleaning Sealing Saffron Walden

The appearance of the encaustic tiles now looks great with a nice even, easy to maintain sheen. I also left them a free bottle of Tile Doctor Neutral Tile Cleaner to maintain their floor after we had finished.

Professional Restoration of an Encaustic Tiled Bathroom Floor in North Essex

Encaustic Tiled Bathroom – Saffron Walden, Essex Read More »

Travertine Tiled Kitchen Floor Before and After Cleaning Saffron Walden

Neglected Tumbled Travertine Floor Renovated in Saffron Walden

1 Comment / Saffron Walden Tile Cleaning, Travertine Tile Cleaning, Work History / Dean Copping / cleaning travertine, Kitchen Floor, north essex, Polishing Travertine, Saffron Walden, sealer removal, Sealing Travertine, trapped dirt, Tumbled Travertine

We recently visited a property in Saffron Walden, a pretty market town in Essex, where the owner asked us to look at her Tumbled Travertine kitchen floor. The floor had been laid and sealed around 10 years prior and the pits in the Travertine had become very dirty with trapped dirt, the floor now had a grubby neglected look about it. No matter how much they tried to clean with a multitude of household cleaners, the floor had become worse and worse which is not unusual as strong chemicals can strip off the sealer completely which protects the floor.

Tumbled Travertine Before Cleaning Saffron Walden

It was clear that the original sealer was no longer doing its job and so I discussed the options for renovating the floor whilst carrying out a test clean. Sealers rarely last ten years, in my experience three years is about the maximum you can expect regardless of manufacturers claims. The test clean went well and we agreed a price and a timescale for the work and scheduled it for the following week.

Cleaning a Tumbled Travertine Tiled Kitchen Floor

It’s not a good idea to apply a different sealer on top of the original unless you know they are compatible, also you can end up with uneven layers so our first step was to strip off any remaining sealer and clean the floor. To do this we used Tile Doctor Remove and Go which is designed for the removal of coatings on tiles such as sealers, adhesives and paints. This product is also great for drawing out ingrained stains and removing heavy grease build-up. It can be used on both vertical and horizontal surfaces. We applied and let it soak into the pores of the Travertine for ten minutes before working it in.

To work the product into the stone and get deep into the pits a coarse 200-grit burnishing pad fitted to a rotary buffing machine was run over the floor and lubricated with plenty of water. After than the floor was rinsed with water and the slurry extracted with a wet vacuum. With the floor clean the process was repeated with finer grades of pads from 800-grit through to 1500-grit. As before between pad the floor was rinsed thoroughly to remove any trace of slurry off the tiles and the slurry extracted with the wet vacuum; the more thorough the rinse the better the finish. By the end of day one the cleaning process was completed, stripped of any coatings and the floor looked much better and lighter in appearance which made the room seem bigger.

Sealing a Tumbled Travertine Tiled Kitchen Floor

The Travertine tiles were left to dry off fully overnight and I started on the second day with a floor inspection to ensure the floor was ready for sealing. At that point I could see that there were a few small areas that needed further attention, so I spot treated them with Hand Burnishing Block. This was followed by spray-burnishing the floor with a very fine 3000-grit polishing pad which is applied using a little water sprayed on to the Travertine. This very fine pad left the floor with a natural looking sheen.

Once we completed this and were satisfied with the finish, all that remained was the sealing of the floor, this will protect it and prevent the dirt from impregnating the pores in the stone. Three coats of Tile Doctor Colour Grow were applied, leaving thirty minutes drying time between each coat. Colour Grow is an impregnating and colour enhancing sealer which leaves the floor resistant to staining and spills whilst improving the natural brown shades in the Travertine resulting in a lovely finish.

The client was very satisfied with the finish, the whole room had been lifted, looking much lighter and brighter.

Tumbled Travertine After Cleaning Saffron Walden

Professional Restoration of Tumbled Travertine Tiled Kitchen in North Essex

Neglected Tumbled Travertine Floor Renovated in Saffron Walden Read More »

Non-Slip Farm Office Floor Before and after Cleaning Saffron Walden

Cleaning Farm Office Safety Flooring in Saffron Walden

1 Comment / Ceramic Tile Cleaning, Saffron Walden Tile Cleaning, Work History / Dean Copping / Altro, Altro Safety Floor, Farm Office, Floor Cleaning, non-slip, north essex, Saffron Walden, Textured Surface

It’s worth noting that I don’t just cover Tile, Stone and Grout, the equipment I use works equally well cleaning all types of hard floors including Patios, Vinyl and industrial flooring. An example of this being a request to clean the floors at an office farm near Saffron Walden which is a lovely medieval market town north of Stansted Airport.

Inspecting Farm Office Flooring

It was an incredibly muddy area with lots of tractors and lorries in the yard and poor drainage. As you can imagine all that mud and dirt was regularly being walked into the office and they were struggling to keep it clean. The main issue was that the floor was covered in a specialist textured surface which increases grip and significantly reduces the chance of anyone slipping.

Farm Office Safety Flooring Before Cleaning Saffron Walden

Manufactured by a company called Altro this product is known as “Safety Flooring” and given then environment I’m sure it was well specified. The downside of a textured surface however is that it traps dirt and once trapped it can be difficult to shift with conventional cleaning methods and equipment.

Deep Cleaning an Altro Safety Floor

The first thing we did was to break out a set of brushes and vacuums in an effort to remove as much dry soil as possible. Once this was done the floor was wetted with a medium dilution of Tile doctor Pro-clean, this product is a great degreaser and after a short time the soil started to lift out of the non-slip textured surface.

After a dwell time of about ten minutes the Pro-Clean was worked into the floor with a black scrubbing pad fitted to a rotary buffer machine. The machine was run evenly over the floor at a slow speed to reduce splashing. The cleaning solution had turned black at this stage with all the dirt that was being released from the flooring. Once this had been carried out we rinsed the entire floor using our truck mounted cleaning system which is a very efficient machine that applies clean water under pressure to rinse the floor whilst simultaneously extracting the soil back to a recovery tank on the vehicle.

Farm Office Safety Flooring After Cleaning Saffron Walden

The truck mounted system utilises a powerful vacuum to extracts a lot of the moisture from the floor but to ensure the floor was completely dry we left drying equipment in place to ensure a quick turn-around for the company.

Industrial Safety Floor Deep Cleaned at an Essex Farm Office

Cleaning Farm Office Safety Flooring in Saffron Walden Read More »