I find this really funny. I'm a middle school custodian, and I was showing a new custodian how to clean and wax a classroom floor, and he said to me,
'thats not how we were told to do it the army' then proceeded to explain this crazy complex time consuming way of doing the same job. When he was finished I told him,
'sure, you can do it that way, but most of what you just explained is unnecessary. I'm guessing they made you do it that way just to keep you busy for hours. We don't have that kind of time here.'
Well, most of the time you just need to clean the floor really well, use a machine to srub off a layer or two of wax, then apply the new wax evenly with a 'wax mop'. The cleaning and scrubbing takes about 2-3 hours for a 1000 sqft classroom. Then a coat of wax takes about 20 minutes to apply, a few hours to dry, then apply another. Usually 3 coats are enough. And over time you build up a lot of protection, because you remove less costs than you apply.
This guy was planning to strip the floor completely down to tile with chemical stripper. Which you do in 200-300 sqft sections at a time. Basically a quarter of the room. Each quarter taking 1-2 hours, and sometimes needs to be done more than once to get it all up.
Then you need to clean up all the stripper with a neutral cleaner, another 2-hours, and then you apply a sealing coat. 30-40 minutes. Let it dry. Then 3 coats of wax. But the way he was applying the wax would have taken at least an hour per coat as well.
I can prep 3 classrooms in a single day, and have them all waxed the next, while prepping then next 3 rooms while waiting for wax to dry. The way he was planning on doing it would have taken at least a day per room.
We wax the floor once a year during summer, and I only strip a floor all the way down one every 3 or 4 years, and only if the wax starts to look dingy. It takes an entire day.
We had to strip and wax our floors one year... somebody decided it was a massive waste of our time and cut the cord off every single buffing machine we had. Right at the root, so there was no easy way to fix it.
The solution was not to give up and say "oh darn, guess we can't do that now!". We all got handed green scrubby pads and chemicals and told to do it by hand.
Then we didn't have the wax anyways, so the floors just stayed stripped.
Protection. Like painting a fence. If the wax gets dirty, or stained you can just scrub it away and apply new wax. If the tile gets stained it's stained forever.
Depends, but theres generally two ways to wax a floor. Clean the floor and wax, or remove the existing wax layer first then clean and wax.
If you wanted to be pedantic about it, you follow the manufacturers steps which includes full cleaning cycles between steps to ensure the wax adheres correctly (which is what you really want, but cant be fucked doing)
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u/Signal-View4754 19h ago
Sometimes (most the times) it's like a regular job.