Restoring Victorian tiles in South London

This post is from a house in Balham where the owner was doing some renovation work and after deciding to change the flooring in the hallway they discovered an original Victorian tiled floor. They planned to restore the floor unfortunately however their builders did not listen and didn’t bother to put down any protection when decorating leaving it in a worse condition than when they found it.

Cleaning the Victorian Tiled Floor

To initially clean the floor I put down a 50/50 mixture of Tile Doctor Pro-Clean and Nanotech Ultraclean diluted with four parts water; this creates a powerful alkaline cleaner that is safe to use on tiles and contains tiny abrasive particles to cut through the grime. This solution was left to dwell on the tile for twenty minutes before being agitated using a rotary machine fitted with a black scrubbing pad. This action did well to deep clean the tiles and remove dirt but there was still plenty of other problems to deal with including paint from the decorating and glue from the carpet.

To remove the glue and paint I treated the surface with Tile Doctor Remove and Go which as its name suggest is designed to remove coatings from the surface of tiles without damaging them. Working in sections the product was left to dwell for forty minutes on the surface of the tile before being worked in by hand into the glue and paint. Once it had all been removed I gave the whole floor a scrub with Grout Clean-Up to remove grout from the surface of the tile and this brightened up the colours. Last step was to give the floor a thorough rinse down using clean water, this is quite important and you need to ensure any trace of product has been removed before sealing. The water was removed using a wet vacuum which literally sucks the water off the floor and reduces drying times, the floor was still fairly damp at this stage so we called it a day leaving an air blower in place to help the floor to dry overnight.

Sealing Victorian Tiles

When I came back the next day I decided to seal the tiles using Tile Doctor Colour Grow which is an impregnating sealer that penetrates into the pores of the tile blocking any dirt from getting in and making the tiles easier to clean.

Two coats were sufficient and Colour Grow also brings out the colour in the tile improving its look, certainly my customer thought so as all they could say was:

“AMAZING I didn’t think it was possible to get like this.”

Source: Residential and Commercial Tile Restoration in London and Surrey