Tumbled Travertine Restoration
We were called to restore this travertine floor in Denbighshire that had a couple of problems:
First: As with many tumbled travertine floors, the holes and crevices had filled with dirt, making the floor look dirty and difficult to keep clean.
Second: The floor had suffered from quite severe settling, causing many long cracks throughout the floor. Over time the cracks had filled with dirt, leaving long black lines throughout the floor.
The homeowner had done their best to look after the floor, cleaning it regularly and re-sealing it a few times. But they had become increasingly frustrated that all their good work did not last very long.
The floor had originally been sealed with an impregnating sealer, however as the surface had worn, the sealer could not prevent dirt locking into the surface of the floor. In view of the traffic on the floor we recommended that the the floor was sealed with a hard wearing surface sealer. This will protect the surface of the stone and act as a sacrificial wear layer, that can be topped up when it shows signs of wear.
On our first visit we cleaned and sealed a sample area. We also filled with an epoxy grout filler. The filler did a great job, however it was a lighter colour than the sealed stone. Unfortunately we could not source a better colour match, as the grout is only readily available in one colour.
On the first day we installed protection to the surrounding walls, adjoining wood floor and bespoke hand painted kitchen furniture. The tiles are slightly uneven and in this situation any brushing process will cause splashes.
While we always take extreme care to minimise any splashing, better safe than sorry. This process took just over two hours. When the job was finished it took only minutes to remove the protection!
The remainder of the day was spent deep cleaning the floor with a heavy duty cleaning chemical, agitated into the stone with a rotary scrubbing machine.
The slurry was removed with our “clean and capture” equipment. This pressurised hot water into the surface of the stone and the holes to release ingrained soil and rinse it out into our truck mounted recovery tank
The pressure rinse had the added advantage of cleaning out the cracks and carrying away any lose stone from the cracks, leaving them ready for filling.
The floor was left overnight to dry.
On the second day we filled the cracks with a Jasmine epoxy grout filler. This took around 4 hours to complete as the cleaning revealed additional cracks!
The floor was then sealed with three coats of synthetic acrylic floor sealer. This is an extremely hard wearing sealer, ideal for this situation.
The homeowner was delighted with the results and commented that the floor had never looked this good.
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