OK, I've been doing my research on this little by little through the week.  The project?  How to clean and protect an aging vinyl floor.  For those who don't know, our kitchen has a really wonderful brilliant white floor that is now about 10 years old.  The problem, of course is that it was no longer white - more of a light, smoggy grey in places.  Normal cleaning does nothing.  So what to do?

Well, I wouldn't want to miss out on a mini-obsession, now would I?  Several elements - cleaning solutions, cleaning method, and (once clean) protection method.

Being a chemist at heart, I attacked the cleaning solution problem first - doing trials on small, labeled floor patched during the commercials in the Olympics.  The candidates were:

• 409 cleaner (standin for "standard soap / surfactant


• Lemon-scented "goo gone" - (standin for "hydrocarbon solvent")


• Acetic acid, 1 % (with a bit of detergent thorwn in as a surfactant)


• Ammonia, diluted 1:10


• Ammonia + Ethyl alcohol (strong imitation of windex, without the blue)


• Tri-sodium phosphate, medium strength solution

I will save you all of the details - the ammonia placed second, with the TSP placing first (which was also the cheapest).  You can just imagine the 10 labeled patches on the floor, all a varying amount of clean!  I'll spare you the pictures.

Next - how to clean the darn floor.  Its pretty big, so we need to think big.

• First disqualification - get down on your hands and knees and scrub with a cloth - even with a small patch, my back ached for several days!


• Works better - grind a cloth around with you foot.  Much better, no hurting back, uses your weight.  TOO SLOW, however!


• SCrub brush - works great, but there is the back problem!


• Rented electric floor scrubber machine - BING!  we have a winner!  Get it a soft pad, sometimes used for polishing, to avoid grinding up your floor.

So this morning we rented the machine ($30 for a day - a deal!).  Learning to "drive" it took a bit of getting used to - it has one large rotating pad, so you lean the machine forwards or back to make it go left or right.  Throw some water / TSP mix on the floor, and scrub away.  The entire job probably took 20 minutes of scrubbing - far less than getting the stuff out of the room.

This left us with one white floor, but still with no gloss, because the polyurathane top coat had worn off years ago.  We rinsed / dried it twice, then applied a commercial polyurathane vinyl top-coat reconditioner on it.  One base coat plus one thin top coat.  Result is wonderful, white and glossy! And I check an obsession off of my list!