Here is a habit worth breaking. A building strips every floor once a year, waxes it, and then does nothing until the following year, by which point everything looks tired again. Dull VCT floors Dunwoody managers keep scheduling that annual strip for are not asking for it. They are asking for maintenance that never got set up. Stripping is the heaviest thing you can do to a tile floor, and every pass takes a little more off the surface. Do it enough times and you really will need new tile, which is a strange way to protect an asset. There is a gentler rhythm that costs less and looks better all year.

Every strip is a small withdrawal from the tile

Stripper softens finish, and the machine that follows it removes what is left. Some of the tile surface goes with it every time, especially at the edges where pads bite hardest.

That is fine occasionally. Done annually for a decade, it thins the tile, opens the surface up so it soils faster, and quietly moves replacement forward by years.

What dull VCT floors Dunwoody buildings need instead

Scrub and recoat. Take off the top of the finish, leave the base coats in place and lay fresh ones. It is faster, gentler and it keeps the floor at a consistent level of gloss.

Add burnishing between recoats and the floor barely has a bad week. A full strip then becomes a rare event rather than an annual line item.

Long-tenured vendors and unexamined routines

Dunwoody buildings tend to keep the same service partner for a long time, which is usually a good thing. The downside is that nobody revisits the plan, and the plan was written years ago by someone who has since moved on.

A twenty minute walkthrough of the Village or a Georgetown medical suite is often enough to find two or three floors on a schedule that stopped making sense a while back.

If you want an outside reference on realistic maintenance frequencies before you renegotiate anything, ISSA publishes the industry benchmarks.

Most commercial cleaning gets sold on price per square foot, then quietly handed to whoever was cheapest and free that night. That’s why quality slides after month two — the scope was never real to begin with. We build yours from an actual walkthrough of your actual building, on your actual hours. Then we send the same crew who learned it. Boring? Completely. It’s also the only thing that makes month five look like month one.

DBS Cleaning Services Group

The day porter nobody in this city buys

Dense medical and dental space along Ashford Dunwoody Road, around Perimeter Mall and Ravinia, generates constant small floor problems: spills, tracked-in rain, scuffs in the waiting area at eleven in the morning.

A few porter hours handles all of it before a patient ever sees it, and it stretches the interval between recoats. It is the most under-bought line item in this part of town, and it is not close.

Frequently asked questions