specialist
Hard floor cleaning, stripping and sealing
Stripping and resealing a hard floor costs £3 to £7 a square metre, and a deep clean without resealing is £1.50 to £4. The job most people actually need is the first one: a vinyl floor that looks grey and tired is usually not dirty but carrying years of polish, and no amount of mopping reaches that.
What this covers
What it costs. Hard floor cleaning costs £1.50 to £4 a square metre for a deep clean and £3 to £7 for stripping and resealing. Full cost breakdown.
What the job covers
- Stripping and resealing vinyl and safety flooring
- Deep cleaning and buffing wood, laminate and engineered boards
- Machine scrubbing tiled and concrete floors
- Removing polish build-up, which is what makes an old floor look grey
- Applying a maintenance finish, and advising on how to keep it
What is involved
Polish build-up is the thing worth understanding. Vinyl and safety flooring are sealed with a polish that is meant to be stripped and reapplied periodically. Where it never is, each new coat goes on over the dirt in the last one, and the floor darkens from the finish rather than from the surface. Stripping takes all of it back to the vinyl and starts again, which is why a stripped floor looks new and a mopped one does not.
Wood is the opposite case and the one that needs the most care. Wood, laminate and engineered boards must not be flooded, and a machine that is right for vinyl will lift a laminate joint in a single pass. They are cleaned with minimal moisture and buffed rather than scrubbed.
Tile and concrete sit between the two: robust and usually machine scrubbed, though on tile the dirt often sits in the grout rather than on the surface, which is a different job again.
What the evidence says
Standards and published measurements, cited so they can be checked.
The grey film on a shower screen is not dirt
Calcium and magnesium in hard water react with soap to form salts that will not dissolve in water. That reaction is what coats a screen, a bath and a tiled wall, and it is why a household in a hard water area scrubs a bathroom that a household fifty miles away wipes. It also explains why a detergent makes little impression on it: the film is already the product of a detergent, and what shifts it is an acid.
Drinking Water Inspectorate. The statutory hardness classification for water supplied in England and Wales, in milligrams per litre of calcium carbonate, and what the dissolved calcium and magnesium behind it are.
Choosing someone for the job
Ask what the floor is before anything else, and expect the method to change with the answer. Vinyl, wood, laminate, tile and concrete each need their own approach.
For vinyl, ask whether the quote is a clean or a strip and reseal. They differ by a factor of two in price and by considerably more in result.
Ask how long before the floor can be walked on and how long before it can be washed. A fresh seal needs curing time, and using it too early is how a good job is undone in a week.
Worth reading first:
Common questions
Why does my vinyl floor look grey?
Almost always polish build-up rather than dirt. Each coat has gone on over the last one without stripping, and the colour is in the finish. Stripping takes it back.
Can you machine clean a laminate floor?
With low moisture and the right pad, yes. With a scrubber dryer configured for vinyl, no: water at a laminate joint lifts it, and that damage is permanent.
Where hard floor cleaning is listed
Towns with a cleaner on this site who takes it on, and how many.