As promised, here's the story on the floors. Que the scary music This is a horror story.
When we did the walk thru back in November, we thought we had a few things to fix. Some painting, clean the floors, patch the walls, fix some ceiling tiles and light fixtures, Nothing difficult, we should be able to do it in a few days and be up and running in no time. When we started the first center, the build out was a real challenge, it took 3 months and most of our money. We tore down a wall, built a new one, installed a bunch of new toilets, had the landlord install some extra fire escapes. Then we had to pull up 2000 sq ft of old ratty carpet, fix the floor and lay tile. This new place was going to be easy. It was already divided up for classrooms, no construction, there was no plumbing to fix, sinks or toilets to install. Everything was in place, we were nearly ready to go.
The truth is beyond the squiggle
We got the keys on New Year's Eve. New Year's day we got inside for the first time. Without furniture, rugs and wall hangings, the place was a different story. The walls were full of tiny holes, they had used staples to attach everything to the walls, even including some pieces of vinyl baseboard that had come loose. Where stuff had been attached to the wall, the management company made them parch the holes. In most cases this meant slapping cheap vinyl Spackle over the plastic or metal drywall hanger. In the large room, the wall was white from the floor to about six feet up and an off white / gray to the ceiling. It wasn't a style choice, they didn't use ladders when they painted. Everything had been stripped off of the walls, including shelves and the fire extinguishers.
But the floors. OMG. Some of the rugs had not been cleaned under in years. Floors had been mopped and waxed without moving the furniture. The floor hadn't been stripped in years. Thick brown outlines of the furniture remained, stains and paint spills where everywhere. In one room there was this spiral of whitish and grayish tiles. Turns out, it was a residue left behind from a floor cleaning exercise done wrong. We thought the tile was gray or maybe some off white shade. We decided that we needed some sort of floor stripper to get this stuff up.
We got out the floor scrubber (a 10+ year old Minuteman 170) and a 4 gal pail of what claims to be a neutral PH cleaner. We diluted it per the directions and loaded up the scrubber. Roll it out to the floor and turn it on. The vacuum works, but nothing happens when I turn on the brush. Nothing. Open up the machine look for loose connections, everything looks OK, but still the brush doesn't spin. OK, let's just slop the cleaner on the floor and go after it with the long handled scrub brushes we brought. No impact on the slime on the floor. Now what? We go to the blue big box and buy their floor stripper. Well, it sorta works on the brown sludge, but this is gonna take forever. One of our parents who's been helping with the painting suggests TSP. His landlord uses it to clean everything, including the floors. We mix up a batch of that and go after the floor. Still no effect.
Now we're getting desperate, we're about 2 weeks into this, the walls are almost done but the floor is a disaster. We can't get the batteries on the scrubber charged, and we still don't know why the brush won't run. My wife wants to open up by the first of February. This is not going to happen.
Then our luck starts to improve. My son figures out that I've been plugging the charger into the wrong half of the power cable. Finally it charges up, but the brush still doesn't spin. One day one of the teachers from the old center drops by to press her case for getting a job. When she's asked about the brush, she shows us the 'clutch' pedal that has to be pushed down and pressed over to engage the brush. Well, that helps, now we're making some progress against the grime. We're still not doing something right as the grime is still not going away.
A few happy accidents helped. First I found while scraping at a paint blob on the floor that I was also peeling up thin curls of yellow stuff. Kinda like the curls of wood that carpenters get from hand planes. Then we stop into an Ace Hardware and pick up some of their brand stripper. This stuff is 50% more expensive but it works a lot better than the stuff from the blue box. But, we're still not making progress with the floor scrubber. It's not taking all the stuff up and it's a bear to control. This new stripper makes the floor "slicker than snail snot" and the scrub pad digs into the wax and tries to pull (sling) you to the right. The footing is precarious, everyone takes at least one fall. We're back to doing it by hand. My son discovers that it's LOTS easier if you spread it out on the floor, let it soak for 10 min then try to scrape it up. He's getting whole sheets of slop up. We've got a whole slew of folks in helping us scape the floor. Many of these people are experienced day care workers and this stuff is grossing them out. This stuff looks worse than what they wipe of kid's noses from time to time and "They let kids play on this floor?"
During one of the visits from the former manager, she said it was hard to make the floor look good. Some times after they cleaned it they had to put 5 or 6 coats of wax on it. She questioned why we were putting so much effort into the floor, "It was just going to get dirty." She recommended just using "Mope and Glow" and just be done with it. I'm starting to think that they just used a floor cleaner, not a stripper and just layered wax on top of wax.
Here's an in process picture:
.
That brown stuff along the far wall is wax after being near the stripper. The stripper 'emulsifies' the wax, and floats it. If it dries, it turns back to wax and hardens. You can kind of see the dividing line between stripped an unstripped floor. The line of red blobs to the left is scrapped up wax and stripper.
Finally, my wife breaks down and lets me rent a true floor machine. That kind of floor buffer you see real janitors using, it's less than $30 per day and since I got it after noon on Saturday, it's only one day rental til Monday. We slop down the stripper, let it set for 10 minutes and start scrubbing it with the machine. In just a couple of hours we go over the entire 1500 sqft (some of it for the 2nd and 3rd time) and get like 95% of the old wax up. What's left is stuff the pad can't reach because of dips and divots in the floor (apparently a flat concrete floor is an oxymoron). Turns out we have WHITE floors in the Preschool room. We still have a white residue on the floor to figure out, but this room is almost done!
We can now move on to the after school room, it's smaller, 1200 sq ft, but parts of it are even worse. After a day or two of my son and I fighting it, our biggest break comes. One of our dads is a floor care specialist for a local flooring retailer. He takes a look at what we're doing, it's not all bad, just need some improvements in technique and some better tools. He shows us how to really use the floor scrubber and get effective results.
In process shot of the after school room:
Dark area has been scrapped by hand and is about to be done by machine. The tile is something of a peach color.
Finding the right stripper was it's own challenge. As I said we started with $9/gal stuff from the blue box. That didn't work so well. We tried the $16/ gallon stripper from our nearest Ace. It worked well, but we were using it nearly straight from the bottle. We bought the last 3 gallons from the local Ace and used them up. They called over to another store and got us 3 more gallons. When we used that up we ordered another case from the local store. I stopped at the orange box and bought their stripper, didn't work any better than the blue box's stuff. I ended up driving 20 miles to another Ace to get 3 more gallons. Our expert told us we were not using the right stuff and took us to a janitorial supply store for $28/gallon professional stripper. Between the Ace and the professional stuff we went thru 18 gallons of stripper. Pretty sad for 5800 sqft of floor.
Ace's stripper worked so we we bought their floor wax. It's a polyurethane. Our floor expert says it's the wrong stuff, we need acrylic. We got real acrylic floor wax from the janitorial supply store in the 5 gallon pail ($108). We'll go thru well over 10 gallons by time we're finished. Finally he shows my son how to apply the wax, it's a lot more art than science.
The pre school room after a professional waxing:
One day a total stranger walks past the pre school room and stops to tell us he's been walking past this store front for years and that's the best this floor has ever looked.
With a new helper and new knowledge the last 4 rooms are finished up in about 3 days. All that's left is the Hall, Kitchen and office. The hall is OK, but there are issues cause the tiles are cupped. The kitchen was just disgusting. There was years (16?) of crud and dust under the fridge and stove. And it's too small for the scrubber, back to the hands and knees. My wife has a set of clothes she wears just to strip floors in. She changes out of them to go home at night. By the time we get them to the washer, the wax is coming out of solution and glues them together.
We finished the office last weekend, I could get most of it with the machine. But under the built in counters, it's back to hands and knees. It's taken us nearly 6 weeks to get the floors stripped (we got other stuff done too). But some of them are still not waxed. By the time we're done we taken out nearly three 5 gal buckets of this slime. Not to mention what we eventually got the floor scrubber to suck up. Still have the adult bathrooms, the laundry room and a storage closet to go.
I guess it's good enough for now. We got past the licensing and health inspections. We're officially a child care center. We got 2 drop in customers last week and they started Monday.
Well, it was a long post, thanks for reading it thru. I think the next one might be called "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle", how to fill a daycare center with toys, rugs, sleeping pads and furniture.
P.S. I haven't forgotten the Job Creator aspect of this whole exercise. This is just the part of build up of creating a business to hire people.