Help: Tile restoration

[BAILEY Tiling]

I have been asked to restore an ols vctorian floor. The house is an old victorian terrace with mosaic flooring that has been there for 100 years so the ustomer tells me. Cannot source the tile to find out what type but hedging my bets on it being dust pressed. Can any offer a solution to how best to clean and restore these back to there best look

 

[frankenfurter]

If it's not what you specialise in doing, I'd recommend you get a specialist in, negotiate a price with them and add a bit on top. That way you've made a few quid and the jobs been taken care without any headaches.

ta,

Frank

 

[enduro]

I have been asked to restore an ols vctorian floor. The house is an old victorian terrace with mosaic flooring that has been there for 100 years so the ustomer tells me. Cannot source the tile to find out what type but hedging my bets on it being dust pressed. Can any offer a solution to how best to clean and restore these back to there best look

Have a look at Aqua mix products, you have everything you need there.

 

[keraldine]

if you pop into or call CTD they should be able to put you in touch with a rep from a company that makes sealers and cleaners etc, we had a local tiler in a similar spot last year and the rep did site visits and product specs and guides and more or less talked the guy through it step by step

 

[frankenfurter]

Have a look at Aqua mix products, you have everything you need there.

I certainly wouldn't recommend any product that requires a dwell time on a 100+ year old floor.

 

[BAILEY Tiling]

cheers for the heads up, but what is the reason for this :huh2:

 

[frankenfurter]

Restoration is a specialist area and a lot can go wrong, easily and disastrously and I personally see tiling and restoration as completely different trades. Professional tilers are just that, professional at making walls and floors look amazing with new tiles - restoration is completely different, different tools, rules and in some instances strict conservation requirements.
Plus I'm pretty sure most tilers public liability doesn't cover restoration work. I pay close to £1600 per year opposed to £120 for standard tiling insurance.
Just as an example: We worked all through Christmas working on a floor in Harborne where a tiler had applied 'professional' cleaning product in accordance with the instructions but couldn't get the floor clean enough, so they did it again and again until they were happy with the results. A week later the whole lot started separating from the substrate. In the end we had to take up the whole floor, clean every tile, strip out the old substrate, put a new substrate in and re lay the floor. And we still had to clean the floor properly as the original attempts were pants.
Now it would be easy for me to call the tiler in question a muppet for doing what he did, but that's not how we see it. He was just doing something he had before with some success and thought the job was within his capabilities - but every floor is different. Plus he provided us with a cracking, challenging job that was really well paid - but not by his insurance as he wasn't covered.
If one of my apprentices turned up with a shop bought product to restore a floor, it would be like me giving a pro tiler a tub of b&q tile & grout to fix large format porcelain to a wall. One size really doesn't fit all.
We've also got a job to do where a 'restorer' has used an abrasive pad to clean a floor full of encaustics and basically sanded them down 'never happened before' he sobs - each encaustic needs a mould to be made, colours matched a total cost of £8422 just for the tiles - nice.
Below is a post I made a while back

I was thinking about these floors the other day.
Some of these floors would have been old enough to go onto lime mortar. If that is the case, could there be an issue of leaving liquids to dwell on the surface? We all know that when lime gets wet, it goes soft.
Just a thought.
Hi Branty,
You raise a very valid point with regard to dwelling liquids on these tiles, and to be honest this point really gets on my ***. A large majority of our work is rectifying problems caused by both DIY mishaps and lack of technical knowledge of the 'professional' in either the mortar material or the tile composition. In short you should never ever dwell a product on a historical floor, especially ones of lime or compressed sand base. To the professional restorer this is as important as tanking is to professional tilers.
Too much liquid or even reapplication of smaller amounts of liquid over time to achieve a dwell time can have disastrous effects, efflorescence being just one of them - if the cleaning product is good enough you don't need a dwell or huge amounts of water.
Much of the problem comes from using products which are designed more for natural stone, right from the start these are not suitable for restoration purposes as they do not react quickly enough; hence the required dwell time. Other than that the major ingredients in these products are nothing better than the DIY products freely available, they're are just dressed a little better.
This week alone I've quoted on 3 floors and will be repairing another 2 next week, all of which have been screwed up by poor technique and knowledge. At least in the past home owners would carpet over the tiled floors if they couldn't sort it out, now they are more than prepared to pay big money for someone to screw it up royally.

Then we get to chaps putting down none breathable impregnating sealers, oleo-resinous seals, polyurethane seals, urea-formaldehyde seals or heaven forbid Wickes wood floor varnish - sure way to screw up a work of art.
So as I said get a pro in, go do a tiling job and earn money on both jobs at the same time. Makes perfect sense to me, you wouldn't catch me trying to do plumbing.

 

[BAILEY Tiling]

Hey Frakenfurter, thanks very much for the info supplied. It is alot more complex a situation than i thought. When you talk to tile shops or read up on the info supplied by the mnfs of tile cleaning products it can be misleading as too how easy the job is when in fact it sounds like a minefield.
Could you advise if there are any courses for tile restoration...

Once again thanks very much.

Brenden (Bailey Tiling & Underfloor Heating)

 

[frankenfurter]

Hi Brenden,

Your most welcome, I hope you didn't think I was putting down tilers' abilities as that's not the case. I just think that we all need our speciality in life. When my wife chose polished marble with ufh for the kitchen I got a pro tiler in to do it; even though I could have done with ease - but its not my speciality. And the results where awesome. All I work on is medieval pavements through to edwardian tessellated floors, no stone, no porcelain, no modern tiles, trims, or ufh.

I don't think there are any courses on Victorian restoration there's too much to it really to learn in a short frame of time, all my lads do an apprenticeship and come from a wide range of backgrounds. And it is a minefield with the literature very misleading and they really aren't that good a product either.

I know aquamix do a course but that concentrates more on natural stone and the like, but again natural stone restoration is a specialist field so where this course falls I do not know; as I'd doubt you would learn everything needed in just 2 - 3 days.

 

[Grace'sDad]

Great post Frankenfurter - really useful, thanks:hurray:

 

[Leatherface]

Leave it to a specialist company mate
They have all the kit

 

[brian c]

contact Kevin at Tilling Logistics..he does restorations etc..pm him