A typical octagon black and white style Victorian tiled hallway that I restored in W13 Ealing. I have seen this design many times in Ealing and the hallways are quite wide and grand in many of the houses. Well at least based on the ones that I have done!
You can see the before and after effect in the above pic. The tiles where very dirty and the customer had said that she could not clean them. So after the deep cleaning process all of the old solidified grimy waxes and oils came out and left the tiles lighter , whiter and much fresher!
In the above pic you can see my Pink Stuff that I have on every job 🙂 Its one of my little tricks and I find it really helps to target difficult tiles with it. It doesn’t always work but is always worth a try.
In the pic above you can see the biscuits this customer gave me with my coffee. You will get extra restoration efforts for treats 🙂
The marble step was also quite dirty so I gave it a quick steam clean. If I was afforded more time on the job I could have completely resurfaced and polished it.
The porch was in a bad dirty state so I applied multiple types  and got very aggressive with the cleaning methods to bring the tiles back alive again.
Exterior Victorian tiles are sometimes stained
It is not easy to clean exterior Victorian tiles on pathways and porches as you do find many of the times that the white tiles are stained. When this happens and regular detergents dont work we can cut the tops off with diamond stone polishing discs. These are pretty expensive and they get ruined very quickly on tiles so its a last resort. Resurfacing the tiles is only effective some of the time as well. The porch in the pics above came cleaner than I thought it would based on the state it was in!
This lady was so nice that I cleaned the step for free. I removed all the mold and applied an appropriate detergent to steam clean it. In the pic above it’s still wet from cleaning. When it dries it will go a bright yellow sandstone colour.
The finished result above . As you can see the tiles are much cleaner and fresher. The white tiles really go white and we color enhance the black tiles to darken them as well. After cleaning allot of the tiles are very porous and sometimes the black tiles can look like more of a grey color. They in fact just looked dark because of the old oils and waxes . I will seal every Victorian tiled  hallway that I clean with a good quality color enhancing sealer. This has to happen at least a day before waxing and only when it’s all dried from the cleaning
I do quite allot of these Geometric hallway restoration jobs in Chiswick as well