- Welshmill Rd, Frome BA11 2LA.
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Sealing
Everybody wants the wet look they saw in a magazine. The problem is that the finish which gives you that look is the one that traps moisture in a floor that has none of its own, and a solid-walled house has to breathe somewhere. Here is every option we are asked about, priced and judged.
On a stone floor in a house that is lived in, this is a real answer and the one we give most often. Lias and pennant darken on their own with use, and a floor left alone for five years looks better than any of the bottled options at year one.
Traditional soft soap, worked in warm and buffed. It builds a faint waxy skin over a few months that resists spills without closing the stone. Needs doing two or three times a year, which suits some households and annoys others.
Soaks in, sits below the surface, and makes the stone shrug off red wine and olive oil instead of drinking them. Changes the colour very slightly and does not shine. This is what we put on a kitchen floor where somebody cooks properly.
The wet look, out of a tin, for about a year. Then it wears through in the traffic lines and goes milky where anything has stood, and the only way back is stripping the whole floor with solvent. Two of the four floors we stripped last year were acrylic.
Belongs on a wooden floor. On stone it sits as a film, cracks along the joints within a couple of winters, and lifts in sheets wherever the floor is even slightly damp underneath.
Lovely on a hearthstone, wrong across a whole floor. It stays soft, holds dirt in the traffic lines, goes dark and blotchy in patches, and every re-coat makes the last one worse.
Costs are what we charge to apply it to a floor we have just relaid, per square metre, materials in. On a floor we have not touched add a clean first.
“It needs sealing or it will stain.”
Stone stains whatever you do. A sealer buys you the ten minutes it takes to mop up a glass of red, which is genuinely useful in a kitchen and pointless in a hall nobody eats in. Decide room by room, not house by house.
“The builder sealed it, so it must be fine.”
Sometimes. Ask what he used. If the answer is a tin from a merchant with the word gloss on it, and the floor has gone cloudy along the route from the door to the sink, it is acrylic and it will have to come off before anything else will take.
“Can you make it look wet permanently?”
Not honestly. Everything that produces that look is a film on top of the stone, and every film on top of stone fails, the only question being whether it takes one winter or three. We will do it if you insist, in writing, and we will still tell you this first.
“We sealed it and now the walls are damp.”
That is the one that brings people to us. The moisture that used to leave through the floor now leaves through the bottom metre of plaster instead. Taking the seal off usually fixes it within a season, and it is a miserable job.
Before anything goes on a whole floor we treat half a square metre in a corner and leave it a fortnight. Stone varies within a single quarry, let alone between one house and the next, and the difference between what a sample board promises and what your floor does is often a full shade.
It costs nothing and it has talked three customers out of sealing altogether, which we count as the patch doing its job.
Ask about a patch test
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