 Late Victorian Encaustic and Geometric Tiled Floor Restoration Posted by Steve Sinnott on 6th April 2011.
The above floor consisted of a small porch at an angle to the main floor, the porch floor was in good to fair condition some damage had occurred through movement. The porch had shifted on it’s foundation’s causing a large amount of movement internally through the floor area and could be seen in shift externally in the brick-work including the stone & brick steps to the property which had come adrift of the main building.
Due to this movement a fair amount of the tiled floor had been removed from the foot of the stairs extending a distance through the main field tiles seen as rectangle in the following pictures.
Another section of flooring square in shape had been removed and infilled this is at the threshold of what will be the kitchen and in front of what is now a downstairs toilet.
Both of the sections missing had been filled with concrete to a depth of over 80mm, the rest of the tiled floor was heavily soiled and was covered also in paint splashes /carpet adhesive and various other marks & stains so much so that some of the colours were hard to verify without some cleaning to confirm colours to match with either new or reclaimed tiles.
Floor restoration always starts with preparation, which in this case meant removing all the broken loose tiles prior to sorting out those that could be kept, these tiles would then have the edges & back cleaned of any adhered mortar, a dirty time consuming job and one of the many “invisible” jobs that need to be done to produce an end result that looks as if it is a well looked after floor rather than a floor most people would consign to a skip!
After all the loose sections have been tidied up (this has to be done otherwise loose tiles which are re-useable can be broken) the next job was too remove the concreted sections, removal was carried out with heavy duty Makita mini- kango type drills.
Other sections removed included all the field tiles in the porch, these were cleaned up to be used in the main floor.
A section of border between the porch floor and main floor in the doorway section had suffered from the dropped porch section. All of these tiles were taken up so that a new screed could be laid to flatten out the large hump.
Also the border tiles taken up were used to replace the missing section in front of the downstairs toilet door.
The field tiles in the porch were replaced by new floor tiles cut into a traditional pattern and complement the main floor by connecting through a similar shaped main tile.
A new connecting threshold pattern was cut & laid between the two floors mirroring the main field tile design with a subtle colour way difference.
Once all the tiles had been cut and the new screeds had dried it was a matter of beating the new and reclaimed tiles into position. Given the enormous amount of damage there had only been a small amount of creep over the years so very few tiles had to be custom cut to fit back into position.
As usual in an old floor there are lots of mistakes by the original fixers this is quite common given they would only have either natural light of which there is precious little or they would have been using oil or gas lamps so it’s not surprising that tiles are out of sequence upside down or the wrong colour!
Rescreeding the missing sections took well over half a ton of material. The original floors were laid over a lime based screed which in turn was tamped down over foundry slag and hard core amongst which they had thrown the debris of a building site of that era: horse manure, broken clay pipes, wood shavings, nails and bits of lead, and general rubbish.
Steve Sinnott works with Heritage Tiling Design & Restoration Co, which is now in its 27th year having opened for trading in 1982. The company’s core business is restoration tiling with an emphasis on Victorian tiling schemes e.g. Victorian geometric tiling or encaustic tiling and of course mosaic tiling.
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