croydon Archives - East Surrey Tile Doctor

Travertine Kitchen Floor Before and After Renovation in Sanderstead

Renovating Travertine Kitchen Floor Tiles in Sanderstead

This customer, who lives in Sanderstead located between Croydon and Purley in Surrey had been experiencing difficulties in keeping her beautiful Travertine tiled kitchen floor in good condition. Over the years it had suffered from a heavy build up of dirt and oily stains, not to mentioned a number of cracks and small holes. Needless to say, the customer was keen to have the Travertine tiles and grout renovated and made easier to keep clean.

Travertine Kitchen Floor Before Cleaning Sanderstead

Restoring Travertine Flooring

To begin the renovation, I applied Tile Doctor Remove and Go across the entirety of the large tiled area. This heavy duty remover breaks down any old sealers and other coatings, leaving the area ready to cleaned or, in this case, burnished.

Burnishing is a method for cleaning and polishing certain types of high-end stone, including Travertine, Marble, and Limestone. Our burnishing system involves the application of four diamond encrusted pads of varying grits. Firstly, I applied the Coarse grit pad, which helps to break down any dirt and stains on the surface of the tiles. Then, I worked my way through the Medium, Fine, and Very Fine pads, using a little water which acts to lubricate the process gradually building the polish on the Travertine. The floor is rinsed with water between the application of each pad to remove the soil that is generated and also give a final rinse at the end before leaving to dry.

To round off the first day of work, I filled any cracks and holes in the Travertine using a colour matching resin which greatly improved the look of the tile.

Travertine Kitchen Floor Cracked Tile Before Repair Sanderstead

Travertine Kitchen Floor Cracked Tile After Repair Sanderstead

Sealing Travertine Tiles

The following day I returned to the property to seal the tiles checking first that the floor had dried. I use a moisture meter to do this and it confirmed the floor was dry so I proceeded to seal the floor using our colour intensifying impregnating sealer Tile Doctor Colour Grow. Once that was dry, I added the finishing touches by buffing the floor with a soft white buffing pad. As you can see from the photographs, the combination of a fresh seal and polish worked wonders.

Travertine Kitchen Floor After Sealing Sanderstead

We did such a good job with the floor that the customer asked if we could also improve the appearance of their natural stone fireplace which was suffering from bad rust and oil stains however I do a separate write up on that.

Cracked Travertine Tiled Kitchen Floor Fully Restored in Surrey

Renovating Travertine Kitchen Floor Tiles in Sanderstead Read More »

Latex Glue Removed from Factory Floor in Croydon

We recently carried out a clean for a printing company in the London Borough of Croydon, who had removed some machinery and had found that the exposed floor had large amounts of latex glue left on the floor. In fact the floor was in such a bad state due to the amount of dirt, oil and glue no one could determine what type of floor we were dealing with.

Factory Floor Cleaning

My first task was to scrub the dirt away using a strong dilution of Tile Doctor Pro-Clean followed by a good rinse, Pro-Clean is a strong alkaline cleaner so it’s safe to use on all sorts of floors and won’t eat into the surface like an acidic cleaners. Once the dirt was removed we discovered the floor was in fact resin based.

Latex Glue Removal

The next thing to do was remove the glue for the floor which was really hard to do due to the thick build-up. We first started with steamers to heat the glue and then used large floor scrapers to lift as much as we could, finally we soaked the area with Tile Doctor Remove and Go and left the solution to Dwell for an hour after which we were able to scrape the remaining glue off.

Last but not least we gave the floor one more scrub with a weak dilution of Pro-Clean and a final rinse.