Our own technicians restore every floor

Each floor type gets its own process

The first job is working out what the floor is made of, and what is sitting on top of it. Marble and granite are natural stone. Terrazzo is chips of stone set in cement or resin, then ground flat. VCT is vinyl tile that needs a coat of finish to look like anything. Polished cement is the concrete slab itself, ground smooth. Most tired lobby floors also carry old layers of finish or sealer, and those come off before any real work starts.

Stone and terrazzo go in a set order. We strip off the old coating, then hone the surface with diamond pads to take out scratches and dull spots. Each pass uses a finer pad than the one before. Then the floor is polished until it reflects the lights, and a sealer goes on to slow down stains. Skip the honing and polish over the scratches, and the floor shines but still looks worn. You see it most when the sun comes through the lobby glass.

VCT is a different job. The old finish is stripped down to bare tile. The floor is scrubbed and rinsed until the stripper is gone, and fresh coats of finish go on once it is dry. Leave stripper on the tile and the new finish will not bond, so it turns cloudy and peels in the traffic lanes. Worn polished cement gets ground back down to a smooth face, then sealed. Tile floors get the grout scrubbed out before it is sealed, because a sealer only locks in whatever dirt it covers.

• Terrazzo and marble honed, then polished
• Polished cement ground smooth and sealed
• VCT stripped to bare tile and refinished
• Grout scrubbed clean before it is sealed
• Scrubbing and waxing included in our janitorial contract

Illinois winters are hard on lobby floors

Every winter in DuPage County, road salt and ice melt come in on shoes and cart wheels. The first stretch of floor inside each door takes most of it. Salt crystals and grit scratch polished marble and terrazzo every time someone steps on them, and a busy entrance can lose its shine in one season. Ice melt also leaves a white film that dries on the surface and gets walked into the rest of the building.

On VCT, that film soaks into the floor finish and turns it hazy white. Mopping with plain water only moves it around. The fix is a cleaner made to lift salt residue, and in bad cases the finish is scrubbed back and recoated. Coating over the haze is the common mistake. It seals the salt in, and the floor stays cloudy under a fresh shine until the whole thing is stripped again.

Summer brings a different problem. Humid summer air slows how fast floor finish and sealers dry, and a coat put down too soon stays soft and scuffs. Concrete slabs poured on the ground also pull moisture up from the soil underneath. A coating laid over a damp slab can lift and bubble, so the slab has to be dry before it is sealed or coated. Getting the timing wrong wastes the whole job, because a failed coating has to be ground off before it can go down again.

Buildings around Lisle use several floor types

Many of the office buildings along the tollway in Lisle, Naperville and Downers Grove are steel frame or precast concrete. Their lobbies tend to have marble, granite or terrazzo, because stone holds up to heavy traffic. Past the lobby, the floors change. Hallways and break rooms are often VCT, restrooms are ceramic tile with grout, and the back of the building sits on bare concrete. One building can need several kinds of floor work, and each has its own schedule.

The buildings we clean run from five thousand square foot medical offices up to a two million square foot corporate headquarters. One long time customer is a world headquarters in Lisle of one point two million square feet. Medical offices usually have VCT or vinyl in the halls and exam rooms. Those floors get disinfected every day. Hospital grade disinfectant breaks down floor finish over time, so those floors need scrubbing and recoating more often than an office hallway.

Warehouses and food distribution buildings are mostly concrete. Forklifts and pallet jacks grind at the surface, and a bare slab sheds fine dust that settles on product and racking. Grinding and polishing the slab, then sealing it, leaves a hard surface that stops the dusting and can be machine scrubbed. We also put down epoxy and other protective coatings where a coating suits the room better. A loading dock and a data center need very different things from the same kind of slab.

Regular care keeps restored floors looking new

A restored floor starts to wear the day people walk on it again. Grit does most of the damage, so daily dust mopping matters more than anything else. Damp mopping with a cleaner that suits the floor comes next. On VCT, spray buffing brings the shine back between full refinishes. All of it is done by our own staff, not a subcontractor. Many of them have been with CLS for more than ten years.

Floor scrubbing and waxing is part of our standard janitorial contract, done once or twice a year depending on the building. Other companies often charge extra for it. That regular deep scrub keeps a floor from sliding back to where it started. When hard floors only get attention once they look bad, the job turns into a full strip or a full hone. That takes longer and closes off more of the building while it dries.

Every building we clean gets one point of contact, the person responsible for the CLS Everyday Cleaner Standard in that building. If a floor needs attention, you tell that one person. CLS is Stone Medic certified. If your lobby stone has gone dull or your VCT has turned cloudy, we offer a free, no obligation building cleaning audit and consultation. It is the simplest way to find out which floors need restoring and which only need better daily care.