There's a gap in the commercial flooring trade that costs building owners real money, and almost nobody warns them about it. Installers install. They lay the tile, they grout or weld the seams, they clean up, and they hand you the keys. What they generally do not do is seal and finish the floor — because that isn't their trade.
The problem is that commercial tile, VCT especially, leaves the factory unsealed. It's porous. Left bare, it absorbs everything that lands on it: foot traffic soil, spills, cleaning chemicals, salt. And it absorbs it permanently. Six months into a brand-new floor's life, you can already have staining that no amount of cleaning will lift, because the dirt is inside the tile rather than on it.
We get called to buildings a year after opening where the owner is frustrated that their expensive new floor already looks tired. In most cases the tile is fine — it was simply never sealed, and now it needs a full strip and restoration to fix something that a sealer coat on day one would have prevented entirely.
Finishing a new floor properly has four parts. First, a post-installation clean-down: construction dust, adhesive haze, and factory film all have to come off, and factory film in particular will stop any finish from bonding if it's left. Second, a penetrating sealer to close the pores of the tile so soil can't work its way in. Third, multiple thin coats of commercial finish built up over that sealed surface, each given full cure time. Fourth — and this one gets skipped constantly — a handover so your cleaning staff know what products are safe on the new coating.
The best time to do this is in the window between installation and opening, when the space is empty and there's no operation to work around. It's the cheapest this job will ever be, and it's the difference between a floor that's protected from day one and one that starts degrading immediately.
If you've got new commercial flooring going in anywhere from Alliston to Toronto, call C.A.M Maintenance Ltd at (249) 288-8040 and we'll coordinate around your construction schedule.