Or, in other words, my new tiles that I laid when I did the work on my fireplace. Which is still unfinished, of course, so what better way to spend the time while I can’t work outside on the X-Air instead of just hanging around wasting it. I don’t know how things are done in the UK because I’ve never had floor tiles quite like these before, but the French way of doing things is to let the new tiles dry out, which I’ve done, clean them up removing any splashes of mortar or adhesive and then apply a coating to provide protection and a good shine. And the more of the coating you apply, within reason, the deeper the gloss becomes.
There are various products available to assist you in this – to remove cement and mortar, to remove old polish or old damaged coatings, various types of coating depending on the tile material and finally, various products for ‘entretien’, or maintaining and looking after your tiles once you’ve done all that’s required. All I want to do for now is clean the surfaces of the tiles I’ve used on the floor and fireplace platform and then give them a couple of coats of sealer to provide the protection they need and make them shine. It was cold and showery again yesterday so I thought it was a good time to browse the shelves at Les Briconautes to see if I could find what I needed. As it happened, I didn’t need to browse for long because shortly after arriving, I asked a young lady assistant if she could help and she and one of her colleagues took me right to the shelf that I wanted.
I bought two items, some cleaner (décapant) and some coating, from the quite large selection of products that were available. I hope they are the right ones but only time will tell when I come to use them. And here they are.
I don’t know what the cleaner contains, but you can see from the information on its container that it is quite corrosive so hopefully it will be effective. The coating is described as ‘longue durée’ (long lasting) and after cleaning the tiles off, my intention is to apply a couple of coats in the hope that the new floor tiles will then be very similar to the existing ones. Although it’ll mean missing a day working outside, I need a couple of dry days to do the work so I know that I won’t get any rainwater dripping down the chimney and with a bit of luck, I’m hoping to do the cleaning this afternoon and the coating tomorrow. Then I’ll finally be able to get my wood-burner installed. I can’t wait, it’s been a long time…
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Yeah, getting adhesive and grout on the tiles and not being able to get it off was my problem too Russ – see my next post. But anyway, it’s done now and it doesn’t look too bad for all that. Now I can get stuck into the X-Air and plan the install of the wood-burner. Bit late now for this year but at least I’ll have it for next winter 🙂
i got the adhesive all over some slate tiles ones, i gave them a quick wipe when setting then left them. i spent hours using chemicals, wire wool, drill mounted nylon “wire” wheels, all to no avail! 6 years later if you look carefully you can still see the damn stuff – like iron!
same result with the acid as you, it bubbled a little on the deposits of adhesive but didn’t seem to do much else!
bathroom is being redone and i look forward to tearing them up!
never made the same mistake again, now carefully remove all adhesive ASAP when tiling!
It turned out to be a proper old damp squib Russ. The cleaner didn’t seem to be very corrosive at all to me and it didn’t seem to do anything when I spread it all over the tiles. And the problem was that the paler floor tiles had got quite stained from the grey adhesive and grout that I’d used. So I ended up cleaning the whole lot up in situ with my wet polishing machine using water from a spray bottle. That did the trick 🙂
careful with cleaner, may contain hydrochloric acid, if it does make sure you have good ventilation. the fumes can tarnish stainless steel for example.