Nearly every house in Moultonborough sits on its own septic system, and a tile floor cleaned properly makes a surprising amount of dirty water. Where that water ends up is our problem to solve, not your leach field’s.
The town’s own profile is blunt about the infrastructure. Businesses and homes near the Center Harbor line can tie into the Bay Sewer District, and that is the extent of it — everybody else has a tank and a leach field out in the yard. Water is the same story. Roughly seven hundred and fifty residences sit on small community systems and the rest of the town draws off private wells. The fire department keeps something like ninety dry hydrants scattered around because there’s no municipal main to pull from.
None of that is a complaint. It’s the condition we work in, and it changes how a tile job gets run. High-pressure hot-water extraction across a kitchen and two bathrooms produces real gallons of gray water with soil and cleaner suspended in it. Pouring that down a sink into a septic system is a lazy way to shorten the life of somebody’s leach field. So we don’t. It goes into the recovery tank on the truck and it leaves with us.
The other Moultonborough wrinkle is the closed-up house. Plumbing that sits unused for months lets the P-traps evaporate dry, and a dry trap is just an open pipe running to the septic tank. People walk into a bathroom in May, catch the smell, and assume the floor is the problem. Usually it isn’t.
A bathroom that smells in the spring is more often a dried-out P-trap than dirty grout. Run every drain for a minute and pour a cup of water down the floor drain and the shower nobody uses before you decide the tile needs anything done to it.
We measure the floor, look hard at the grout, and tell you what it is before anything starts. Grout that reads dark because it’s packed with soil cleans up and looks near new. Grout that reads dark because it’s worn down, cracked, or stained through is a different conversation, and we’d rather have that conversation standing in your kitchen than on a follow-up phone call. Sometimes the answer is color-sealing. Sometimes the answer is that this is as good as this floor gets.
Then the work itself. A pre-treatment sits on the grout lines long enough to break the soil loose, gets agitated along the lines mechanically, and a spinner tool rinses with hot water under pressure while pulling the slurry straight back in the same pass. Nothing sheets across the floor and nothing goes down your drain. Natural stone gets a neutral cleaner instead — an acidic product on marble or limestone etches it permanently, and that mistake sits there under the window for the rest of the floor’s life.
Sealer goes on last if you want it, and only onto grout that’s fully dry. A penetrating sealer buys you time before the next cleaning; it isn’t armor and we won’t sell it as such. On a house that’s empty half the year it earns its keep, because a floor here can go months without anybody around to notice a drip.
Tile and grout runs $1.50–$3.50 per square foot depending on what shape the grout lines are in, and sealing is priced separately by area. We measure and hand you a flat number before the first drop of water hits the floor.
Into the recovery tank on our truck, and off the property with us. The spinner tool rinses and extracts in one motion, so the slurry never reaches a drain at all. Sending a few hundred gallons of gray water into a septic system is hard on the tank and harder on the leach field, and there’s no reason to do it.
Probably a dry P-trap, which is common in a house that sits empty. The water standing in the trap evaporates over a few months and the pipe turns into a direct line to the septic tank. Run the fixtures and pour water into anything that never gets used. If the smell survives that, call us and we’ll come look.
No. Slate, marble, and limestone get a neutral product and lower pressure, because the acidic cleaners that cut soap scum off ceramic will etch natural stone, and that damage doesn’t buff back out. We identify the material before we pick anything. If you don’t know what you’ve got, we can usually tell by testing a corner.
Yes, and we do it constantly in this town. Somebody has to get us in — a caretaker, a neighbor, a lockbox code — and the water needs to be turned on with the heat above fifty. We send photos before and after, and you get the same invoice you’d have gotten standing in the room watching.
Depends on traffic and whether it’s sealed. A sealed kitchen floor in a house used on weekends holds up a couple of years without trouble. A year-round mudroom with a dog and a winter’s worth of sand through it is closer to an annual job. We’ll give you a realistic interval for your floor instead of a number off a chart.
Flexible scheduling, flat prices quoted up front, and a crew that knows the Lakes Region.
Tell us where the property is and what needs cleaning. We'll get right back to you with a straight, flat price.
We reply to every request within 1 business day.