Polishing a Terrazzo School floors

This Terrazzo Floor was at the entrance to a School in Kilmacolm where as you can see from the photograph below had come under some heavy use and was now proving difficult to keep clean. We were asked to give it a deep clean, polish and re-seal therefore making it much easier to maintain going forward.

Cleaning a Slate Floor

Hard stone surfaces such as Terrazzo have to be burnished to get the shine back and this process basically involves cutting back the surface with a set of diamond encrusted burnishing pads.

Before burnishing however the floor was swept out to remove any loose debris that could get caught under the pads and scratch the floor. Once that was done a Coarse 400 grit burnishing pad was fitted to our heavy rotary machine and run over the surface with a little water to help lubricate the process, the coarse pad removes surface dirt and coatings such as sealers. Once that was finished we moved onto the medium 800 grit pad which is the first step of the polishing process and also removed ingrained dirt. The surface of the Terrazzo is still quite rough at this stage so once complete with the medium pad the fine (1,500 grit) is used smooth down the surface and continue to build up the polish in the floor. The last pad is a very fine (3,000 grit pad) and this pad builds on the existing polished effect to create a high shine finish.

All these pads are applied with water and the resultant slurry needs to be cleaned off during the process with the final step of giving the floor a thorough rinse with clean water, I can recommend a wet vacuum at this point as it makes light work of removing liquids from floors.

Sealing a Terrazzo Floor

Once the floor was completely dry it was sealed using two coats of Tile Doctor Colour Grow which is a great product to use of these characteristic floors as it brings out the colour in the floor as well as providing on-going stain protection. The floor was then buffed using a white buffing pad to bring up the shine further; needless to say our client was extremely happy with the finished result.