More than a quarter of the houses in Laconia went up before 1939. A lot of them still have the original tile bathroom, and the grout in it hasn’t been white since Truman. We clean it the way mopping can’t, and we seal it so it stays that way.
Laconia’s a mill city, and it shows in the floors. Lakeport grew up around the dam between Paugus Bay and Opechee Bay, making hosiery and knitting needles and steamboats, and the houses that went up for the people who worked there are still standing on the side streets. By the last housing count, something like 27 percent of the city’s homes are pre-1939. Those houses have small ceramic hex-tile bathrooms with grout lines that have soaked up eighty or ninety years of mop water. They’re dark gray. They didn’t start that way.
Downtown is the other end of it. The Belknap Mill on the river, 1823, is the oldest unaltered brick textile mill in the country, and the buildings around it have been turned into condos with new kitchens and new tile. New grout darkens faster than people think — it’s porous, nobody sealed it, and a year of coffee and road slush is enough to put a gray line down the middle of the kitchen.
And everybody’s got an entry. Route 11, Union Avenue, Main Street through the winter, the salt trucks run all night. That salt comes in on boots, sits on the tile, and leaves a white crust the grout drinks up. By March the mudroom floor looks like it was grouted in ash.
If you’re in one of the old Lakeport or downtown houses, don’t let anyone bleach the hex-tile grout to get it white. It’ll eat the grout and it won’t touch the dirt underneath. Get it extracted clean, then color-seal it if it’s stained for good. Looks like new grout without tearing out a floor that’s outlived four owners.
Grout is a sponge. Every mop pushes dirty water into it and the water dries there. So we don’t mop. We put down an alkaline cleaner and let it sit long enough to break the buildup loose, scrub the lines by hand where they’re bad, then run a hot high-pressure tool that blasts the grout channel and vacuums the dirty water straight up into the truck. Nothing’s left on the floor to soak back in. On an old hex floor that first pass is the moment people say “huh, it’s white.”
After that, sealer. A penetrating sealer on clean grout means the next salt puddle or coffee spill sits on top where a rag gets it. If the grout’s stained permanently — and in a pre-war bathroom it sometimes is — we can color-seal it a uniform shade instead. Kitchens, baths, mudrooms, the tile hallway in a mill condo. Natural stone gets a different, gentler cleaner. We’ll know which you’ve got before we start.
Tile and grout runs $1.50–$3.50 per square foot depending on how far gone the lines are; sealing is quoted per area. We measure the floor, tell you the flat number, and that’s the number.
Most of it, yes. Old hex-tile grout is dark because of what’s soaked into it, not because it’s gone bad. Pressure extraction pulls that out. Where the grout is stained through or crumbling, we’ll tell you, and color-sealing gives you an even, fresh line without ripping out the floor.
Because nobody sealed it when it went in. New grout is as porous as old grout, so a winter of slush and spills soaks right in and dries there. We clean it, we seal it, and it stops happening. Takes an afternoon.
It’s hurting the grout more than the tile. Road salt dissolves in the melt, wicks into the grout, and dries into a white crust that keeps pulling moisture. Left all winter it dulls and pits the lines. A spring extraction flushes it out.
Both, but stone gets a neutral cleaner instead of the strong alkaline one, because the wrong product etches slate and marble. Tell us what you’ve got when you call, or we’ll figure it out when we see it.
Right away for cleaning — the extraction leaves the floor nearly dry. If we seal, stay off it a few hours and keep it dry overnight so the sealer cures. We’ll do the bathroom first so it’s ready by evening.
Flexible scheduling, flat prices quoted up front, and a crew that knows the Lakes Region.
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