A VCT floor is only as good as the finish on top of it. The tile itself is durable and cheap to maintain, which is exactly why it is used in offices, medical facilities, schools, retail floors and back-of-house areas — but the wax layer is what people actually see, and once it yellows, greys or wears through in the traffic lanes the whole floor reads as tired regardless of the tile underneath.
Buffing a worn finish only polishes the damage. Once the coats have broken down, the answer is to take them off and build them back up.
Strip, neutralize, seal, then build the coats
The old finish is chemically stripped and removed down to the tile, taking the embedded soil with it. The floor is then rinsed and neutralized — leaving stripper residue behind is the most common reason a new finish fails early, and it is invisible until the coats start lifting.
A sealer goes down first to give the finish something to bond to, then finish coats are applied one at a time with drying between each. The number of coats depends on the traffic: a back office and a hospital corridor are not the same floor, and pricing a corridor as an office is how a floor ends up needing doing again in six months.
Scheduled around the business
A stripped floor cannot be walked on while it is being refinished, so almost all of this work happens at night or over a weekend. We schedule it that way as a matter of course, and for buildings on a maintenance program we book the cycle in advance so nobody is negotiating dates each time.
We work with offices, medical facilities, apartment complexes, hotels, restaurants and retail spaces across Oroville, Chico and Butte County, and the same crew comes back — which is worth more on a commercial floor than any single visit, because they already know where the problem areas are.
Where we work
High Tech provides vct strip & wax services across Butte County, California — Oroville, Chico, Paradise, Palermo, Durham, Gridley, and Biggs — and just over the county line in Marysville. See every area we serve.