DIY Tips for Your Flooring Surface

10 January 2013
By Russell

5 Tips for maintaining your flooring surface

Whether or not you see it this way, the truth is, the floor in your warehouse, or your delicatessen, or your cool room, lab or food preparation area is an asset to your business. The rationale for this statement is simple: IF your floor breaks down, is unsafe or unhygienic, then you will need to shut down to bring the floor back to a working condition and ensure your floor complies with relevant legal and OHS requirements. Worse still, if you are forced to shut down till the floor is fixed, you start to experience loss of revenue and this is where your floor starts costing you big money.

As with all your investments, your floor requires a bit of TLC. We’ve put together a list of things you can do to ensure your floor’s lifespan is extended as long as it can be before you need to consider new flooring options.

Clean the floor regularly

If you have an expensive piece of machinery or a company car, you will undertake to service it regularly to ensure it operates at its optimum for as long as possible. Failure to do that will mean break downs and increased bills to fix it.

The same goes for your floor. If you don’t clean it, grit, acids, chemicals and other debris will build up and damage your surface making it either unsafe or unhygienic (and smelly more often than not) or both.  You will then be required to undertake wider repairs or replacement of the floor.

Our tip is to clean the floor regularly (you will know better than we will what that means based on the nature of your business). Make sure you don’t use abrasive chemicals which were not recommended for cleaning. If you do, your floor will suffer.

Teach your staff what is acceptable and not acceptable on your floor

If your floor is a showroom then it is unlikely you will want pallet racking on the surface, and similarly, if your floor is in use in a kitchen you will not want a forklift in the kitchen. Make sure you and your staff all know what is acceptable and not acceptable on your floor. Don’t put your floor under undue stress and it will thank you.

Conduct regular inspections of your floor

You check the oil in your car, you monitor the quality of the products you produce, so you should check the floor on which your business is literally built. If you identify the floor is dirty you can clean it, or if you see signs of damage you can address them before they become more widespread. Remember, prevention is better than a cure.

Don’t DIY flooring fixes for specialised surfaces

It may seem appealing or even easy to repair a flooring issue you have identified during a check. However, failure to prepare the area correctly prior to implementing a solution can result in you causing more damage than you think.

If you fail to clean the surface or prepare it properly your ‘fix’ may trap bacteria and moisture below the surface, causing the surface to bubble and crack very quickly (not to mention become unhygienic). Similarly, if you use the wrong preparation to fix the surface, then you will likely just be creating a band-aid solution which needs fixing sooner than you could think possible.

If you use machinery, ensure that your surface is resilient to that type of traffic

Seems obvious, right? Sadly a lot of people don’t stop to think about this. They have a beautiful vinyl floor but need to take delivery of a large pallet of materials. So they let the driver use the forklift to offload the materials. Sadly, the twisting and turning of the tyres will rip the vinyl up.

Tiles are similarly prone to damage under heavy traffic. Our advice, make sure you think about the surface prior to conducting what may seem to be routine procedures. If you need to use forklifts, for example, an epoxy floor trowelled to the right thickness is going to be required. In the same way, it’s horses for courses, different industries and business require different flooring solutions.

If you have any questions regarding your flooring maintenance, call Remedial today, or leave a comment below with your details and we will come back to you.