Précieux

One of the things we've most commonly heard (after looking through all the s**t, literally and metaphorically) is: "What beautiful tiles!"

In an earlier post we touched on the joys of having a largely untouched house with lots of original features. After the last post ,which bought more nice comments, it feels like the time to address the tile issue.

So Belgium - or more specifically Florennes - apparently had a massive cement tile industry until the mid 20th century; after which a combination of post WWII depression and new, cheaper tile technologies probably killed it off. The upshot of this is that almost every pre-war house in Brussels has beautiful cement tiles from the era; ours included.

Bathroom - old and new cement tiles. Our expanded floor required just under 1m2 of new tiles to match the 100 year old ones. No easy task to match size, colour and pattern to some extent..

And there are some on the toilet floor (in the room formerly known as the $***hole). This floor was particularly fun to clean.

This photo. Again. Sorry, best one of the kitchen floor tiles.

Cement tiles, if you don't know them are basically hand pressed ink patterns on a small piece of cement. This has the upside that they can be used to create beautiful colourful patterns across large spaces; a bit like tile carpets. And the downside that they are porous, so those colours can quickly turn into a merky mess if not properly cared for. In a word, precious (précieux doesn't quite have the same connatations in French as it does in English but we're using it for the blog post tile anyhow).

Therefore one of our ongoing jobs has been restoring our cement tiles. More complex than it sounds. Did we mention cement tiles are high maintenance? So much so they may even quality for membership of the Kardashian clan...

Down to how we go about restoring them. Step 1 is a thorough wash with a neutral soap and warm water. Cement tiles are not fans of linseed oil in soap, and apparently linseed oil is in many floor cleaning products, so we got some stone /cement tile specific soap for this. Of course with our layers of dog byproduct on the tiles, what may normally be one wash was more like three or four washes... but ok.

The starting point. Definitely seen better days.

A couple of washes later...

Step 2 was a rinse down with normal water, and a scrub with a brillo pad. Painful on hands and knees but a good way of seeing in detail what grime is still left behind and targetting it as much as possible.

And a rinse and brillo later.

Step 3 was wet sanding. We did all the tiles with an 800 grade, and focused on problematic stains with a 320 grade. In a way this step seemed like at least a partial repetition of stage 2. However, with years of accumulated dirt, each step served it's purpose; the brillo cleaning up they easy pickings and the wet sanding giving a deep overall clean plus removing more stubborn marks.

Bzzzzzzzzz.

Step 4 was sealing. As noted above, cement tiles are porous, just like cement*. Without treatment (sealing) they'll absorb whatever is split on them, plus absorb its colour. So spill a glass of red wine and you get.... burgundy tiles (surprise surprise). To avoid this they need to be sealed with something which makes them impermeable. Sealing is multi stage process, generally between 2 and 4 seals are recommended (we did 3 so far; and will do one more when everything is finished). Sealant is both rare and expensive, but luckily we managed to get 10 litres on the cheap shipped from the South of France. It might not boast the fancy colour rendition that some hydrofuge twice the price or more do, but it definitely works.

After all that we get to this:

Final product

OK, it's not perfect. It will never be perfect. That is part and parcel of having old things. But no-one is going to spend time on their hands and knees examining the imperfections... except maybe the taker of the photo above :-).

Three rooms done (bathroom, toilet, new kitchen) and one to go.

* unless special admixes are used as well.