Saffron Walden | Tile Cleaners

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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

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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.