The best-known tile in Center Harbor is probably over the children’s shelves at the Nichols Library — the Mother Goose tiles from the American Encaustic company in Zanesville, Ohio. We don’t clean those. But they’re a good reminder that old tile here isn’t all the same stuff, and it shouldn’t all get the same treatment.
James Nichols built the library in 1909 and 1910 on the lot where the Senter House hotel had burned, and hired Charles Brigham of Boston to design it. It’s a small classical building, barrel-vaulted ceiling over the stacks, and the architectural people call it one of the finest small libraries in the state. The tiles are part of why. That era of tile is in a fair number of village houses too — little white hex in a bathroom, a patterned entry, a hearth surround nobody’s ever dared pull up.
Then there’s the modern kind, which has a harder life. A mudroom off Route 25 or 25B takes road salt all winter, from boots and from the dog. Salt dries white in the grout lines and keeps pulling moisture back in. Add spring mud and a summer of lake sand on the kitchen tile, and by fall the grout is a couple of shades darker than the day it was set, sometimes a lot more than that.
Same job on paper. Very different floors. And the mistakes people make on old tile are permanent, which is the whole reason to slow down.
If the tile in your house might be original, say so when you book. A five-minute test corner is cheap. Etched hundred-year-old tile isn’t fixable.
We identify the floor before we pick the chemistry. Glazed ceramic and porcelain take an alkaline cleaner, a stiff brush, and a hot rinse-and-extract without complaint. Unglazed tile — encaustic, quarry, old cement tile, a lot of early hex — is porous all the way through. Strong acid can etch it, and a harsh scrub can wear down the color, because on cement and encaustic tile the color is in the body of the tile, not painted on top.
Stone is its own thing. Marble and limestone are calcium-based and acid dulls them in seconds; that’s why a vinegar “home remedy” leaves rings on a marble bath. Slate and granite are tougher but still get a neutral cleaner from us. On anything we’re unsure of, we test a corner first and look at it dry.
For salt, we do a neutral rinse first to lift the white haze before the real cleaning. Then grout lines get brushed and extracted. Sealing afterward is optional and priced separately — worth it in a salted mudroom, less important in a bathroom nobody walks in with boots on.
Tile and grout runs $1.50–$3.50 per square foot, depending on how dark the lines have gone and what the tile can safely take. Sealing is quoted per area on top. We measure, then give you the flat number before anything gets wet.
Usually, with care. The color goes through the tile body, so the risk is etching or wearing it with strong acid or aggressive scrubbing. We use a pH-neutral or mildly alkaline cleaner, a soft-to-medium brush, and test a corner first. Badly cracked or loose old tile we’ll point out before touching it.
Almost always road salt, carried in on boots and paws through the winter. It dries into the grout and the tile surface and keeps drawing moisture. A neutral rinse removes most of it before the real cleaning. Sealing the grout afterward makes the next winter much easier to keep up with.
It usually brings grout back a long way, often close to its original color. Grout that’s stained deep, cracked, or crumbling won’t fully recover. In that case regrouting or a color seal is the honest answer, and we’ll show you which lines are in that condition before you decide.
On glazed ceramic, mostly. On marble, limestone, travertine or unglazed tile, no. Vinegar is an acid and will etch calcium-based stone and damage some old tile and grout. If you don’t know what your floor is, plain warm water is safer until someone identifies it.
Within an hour or two after cleaning, in socks. If we seal, give it the time on the product we use, usually a few hours before light traffic and overnight before heavy wet boots. We’ll tell you the exact time for your floor before we leave.
Flexible scheduling, flat prices quoted up front, and a crew that knows the Lakes Region.
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