Limestone is used in many areas in the home. It can be an amazing floor tile with a finish many other types of natural stone tiles can’t match.
In this bathroom in St Andrews it had been damaged when the client moved some furniture. They dragged a sideboard unit across the floor and it had scratched almost the full length of the floor. At first they tried to use a company to repair it but the scratch was still very visible. All they managed to do was fill and then paint over it. This looked poor and you could still see that the floor had a major scratch, drawing your eye to it immediately.
Luckily enough at Tile Doctor we regularly receive enquiries about damage like this on many different types of floor and wall tiles (Marble, Limestone, Travertine and flagstones). With the correct equipment and trained specialists scratches like this one can be repaired to the point of it being invisible.
To carry out the work I first prepped the room to protect the furniture and glass shower doors from being sprayed with residue from the milling that was about to start. Milling is a process of removing a fine layer of the limestone tile using varying level of milling pads with different levels of grit. It is an important part of the process and one that required a great deal of patience and skill to ensure the tile is kept flat and not indents are left but working on the tile in an uneven way. Between each different milling pad used the floor has the residue removed with a wet vacuum and then the floor is rinsed. With each milling pad you can see the scratch starting to disappear. Working away up the levels of milling pads the floor slowly started to show less and less of the scratch until it had been entirely removed. Taking care to treat the whole floor with the pads was crucial to keep the tiles all level and not showing any kind of bevel on the floor.
Once the floor had been left to dry out for a couple of days I returned to seal the floor with an impregnating, colour enhancing and tough sealer. This was applied using a white cotton pad and was left on for 10 minutes. The residue was buffed off and left for 30 minutes. A second coat was applied and the same procedure followed. After 2 hours I performed a water test.
