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.
