I am a specialist Victorian tile restorer and work all over South Buckinghamshire, including Chesham ,Amersham and Beaconsfield. There are many cottages and farm houses around these areas with many old quarry tiles, terracotta and even original antique flagstones. Well I can help with all of these and more.
Deep cleaning Victorian tiles service
We will usually need to deep clean original tiles that we are restoring and need to seal or wax. The purpose of the deep cleaning is to draw out allot of dirty old products and grime that usually sits deep with in original Victorian, quarry and terracotta tiles. These tiles are very porous and the passage of time often makes them even more porous and fragile.
The Victorians and people who owned these tiles back in the day used to maintain them with natural materials such as bees wax, and oils. These waxes and oils did a very good job keeping these tiles protected over the years as I have seem some very good condition original tiled floors that have had no modern tiling products applied to them. The only problem is that when solidified over decades waxes and oils are very hard to remove and this is the reason that normal home cleaning methods and detergents cant clean Victorian and quarry tiles. Often homeowners are amazed at the black dirty sludge that I draw out of these tiles, and they always say the same thing….”But I clean them all the time!”
Repairs to Victorian tiles, filling and color touch ups.
On most original old Victorian tiled floors and also sometimes quarry tiles we will need some tile repairs which can range from a few loose tiles to large patches of missing or damaged tiles. On Victorian tiled floors the more complicated patch repairs can get quite tricky, and separate the men from the boys type thing!
During this stage work can get quite time consuming and expensive and I like to work with the customer to do the parts that need to be done. Allot of the little blemishes can be seen as character marks so we do sometimes leave these and focus rather on completely cracked or unsightly damaged tiles.
Filling, coloring and touching up chips on Victorian tiles
On every restoration I will usually do some filling and coloring touch ups to the tiles that this can be done to. Its much quicker and cheaper to fill and paint a little chip or blemish rather than replace the whole tile. I can usually breeze through the entire floor in a couple of hours and make all the eye catching funny bits disappear. These are specialist enamel tile restoration paints similar to car body touch up paints. This process works on quarry and terracotta tiles to.
