Page 3 - 2019-02-CFR Volume 125 - Cleaning Textured Hard Surface Flooring - February 2019

The experience with dry compound for construction
cleanup of drywall compound has been very suc-
cessful in testing and real-world practice. Drywall
dust cleanup into the crevice areas is quite a chal-
lenge. Most construction practices allow the flooring
to be installed before the wall treatment is finished.
This leaves a large amount of drywall product on the
floor. Using mops and buckets is still the preferred
method of most construction cleanup crews. This
puts the drywall mud into solution and that is left in
the crevices. More mopping will not clean this floor-
ing.

This phenomenon is similar to washing hardwood
floors with water but without the danger of getting the
wood wet. A pre-finished wood floor can have a huge
potential to swell when exposed to even a small
amount of water-based cleaning agent. Wood can
expand when wet up to four percent across the
grain. This is why plank wood floors are only in-
stalled in on-grade locations and nailed directly to
the wooden substrate. Engineered wood floors can
take a bit more moisture as they are cross laminated
to minimize any expansion. Site finished floors coat-
ed with a polyurethane layer are less susceptible to
water intrusion.

Success has been found using the waterless dry
compound to not allow the dust to become suspend-
ed in the cleaning solution. Dry compound will clean
the crevices without reinstating the soils back into
the spaces. This method has been done successfully
in several locations after regular construction clean-
up processes have failed. Soils need to be physically
extracted to get deep down cleaning accomplished.
Dry compound techniques will complete the extrac-
tion of the soils more completely in this particular sit-
uation.

Come on over to the dry side when you have a com-
plicated floor or need to be as dry as possible to not
allow bad things to happen to your natural flooring.
And hey I did not even mention what is possible on
ceramic tile and grout with compound!! We will save
that subject for another article in the future.

3 Commercial Flooring Report February 2019