The Best Stone Tile Cleaning to Date
Have you ever walked into a home and thought the floor was just dirt because it was so dirty? I mean to the point where you can’t tell if its tile, stone, or carpet underneath… It’s rare and not likely many people will see it before that house hits the market again. I have added a few pictures to fill in the blanks for you. I could have literally scraped dirt off the floor in the living room. Check it out.
The stone flooring has numerous areas were candy was pressed into the stone and left for quite some time. In the before pictures you would never of guessed what could lie beneath all of the dirt and grime. But floors don’t end up like this overnight. It takes a few years of extreme abuse and a serious lack of cleaning for floors to take on so much crud.
Tile / Stone Restoration Before Cleaning
This picture doesn’t do a lot of justice for how dirty the place really was. After talking to the landlord and exploring the house I found that the previous residents were quite rough on the whole house. They didn’t tend any of the floors throughout the entire house. This house has the outdoor stone (as see above), carpet (mostly upstairs), and about 3 large areas of real wood flooring. All areas of the floor were pretty tore up.
I did a full restoration cleaning on the carpet as well but I’m more opt to show you the after pictures of the outdoor stone and tile cleaning I did. Before I go into that though I’d like to walk you through the cleaning process.
The Cleaning Process
1.) I began by using a large push broom to get up all the loose debris and dirt that was floating around. This helps get some debris out of the way but not much because of how dirty the floor was overall.
2.) Using a chemical injection sprayer, I put together a highly concentrated dose of floor treatment. It was a combined basic floor cleaner, enzyme booster, oxygen booster, with a good solid shot of citrus degreaser. This type of mix-up is guaranteed to eat through any grime it’s put up against.
3.) Attack the floor with a twenty inch floor scrubber. This scrubber uses stiff nylon brushes and spins about 175 rotations per minute. In most cleaning processes this is known as agitation and is critical to a deep cleaning.
4.) Using approximately 1200 psi hot water, I used an outdoor pressure washing instrument known as a tile spinner to wash the floor of the nasty paste that covered it. Here is a link to the tool I used. – The difference is when I used it, it had the attachment on it that makes it a hybrid tool.
5.) Finally after 24 hours of fans blowing across the freshly cleaned tile, I went ahead with sealing it. A mop and bucket of sealant were used to apply the invisible protective coating.