The task was to restore this Honed Travertine flooring in Kensington, London which ran through the ground floor area and to a small area in the basement. The floor had been laid nine years prior and had only had regular washing by the housekeeper and was now overdue a deep clean and re-seal..
Restoring Travertine Tiles
It was a large area so it was necessary to work in sections which had the added complication of having to move the customer’s furniture around.
With each area I scrubbed the floor with a rotary machine fitted with a medium brush head and a hot 3:1 dilution of Tile Doctor Pro-Clean. I scrubbed it in and soaked it on the floor for 10 minutes before scrubbing again then vacuumed it away with a wet vac. I then checked all the grout lines were clean in case the brush head had missed any.
Next I fitted a pad holder to the rotary machine and using a medium grade burnishing pad scrubbed the area again, I then followed this up with the fine grade pad to build a nice sheen on the stone to match the customers’ requirements.
During the cleaning process it became obvious that some of the Travertine tiles had holes in them, it’s possible they had been this way when supplied but it’s also possible that they had been worn through by the use of an acidic cleaning solution. so after once the tiles were cleaned and polished I filled in the holes with a matching filler.
Sealing Travertine Tiles
The next step was to seal the Travertine to keep it from future staining and for this I used Tile Doctor Colour Grow which is a colour enhancing impregnating sealer that fills the pores in the stone. In total I had to use three coats on sealer on the stone due to its porosity. I finally buffed the floor using a white soft buffing pad; this was to take off any seal left sitting on the surface of the stone and helps to work it in.
In total it took four days to do this job and the client was really grateful with the result and left a very nice testimonial on the Tile Doctor website.
