Dunwoody keeps its vendors a long time, which is usually a good sign. It also means a lot of buildings are running a floor schedule somebody wrote years ago and nobody has questioned since. Very often that schedule says strip and refinish, every year, whether the floor needed it or not. That habit is the real subject of stripping vs burnishing Dunwoody. Stripping is not free just because it appears on a routine line item. Every removal is chemically and mechanically hard on the tile underneath, and a floor stripped too often wears out early. Doing less, more thoughtfully, is the better plan.

An annual strip is a habit, not a maintenance plan

Nobody sets out to over-service a floor. It happens because the line was on last year’s scope and copying it forward is easier than assessing the building again.

Meanwhile the floor may have been perfectly fine with a scrub and two fresh coats. Same appearance in the morning, far less taken off the tile.

What long-tenure buildings get wrong about stripping vs burnishing Dunwoody

The assumption is that more aggressive equals better cared for. On vinyl tile the opposite is often true, because stripping is the one step that touches the tile itself.

A good program looks boring. Regular cleaning, timely recoats, polishing to keep the gloss, and a full strip only when the finish has genuinely failed.

Every strip takes something off the tile

Stripper softens finish so it can be removed, and the machine that follows works right down to the tile surface. Do that often enough and the tile itself thins, especially at edges and seams.

Tile is the expensive part of the floor. Finish is the sacrificial part. ISSA industry resources resources describe maintenance as a cycle for exactly that reason, and stripping sits at the far end of it, not at the center.

Most cleaning contracts get bid on a rate and staffed by whoever came in lowest that month, so nobody has any reason to recommend the smaller job. We scope from a walkthrough during your real hours, and if the floor does not need stripping, we will tell you so.

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

A day porter keeps floors out of trouble entirely

Floors fail from grit. Grit comes in on shoes, and most of it enters in the first few steps past the door. Matting and midday attention stop it before it ever reaches a corridor.

In a building around Perimeter Mall or Ravinia, or the small clinical suites in Dunwoody Village and Georgetown, a few daytime hours on entries can push a recoat months further out. That is the least glamorous saving in the building and one of the largest.

Frequently asked questions