Glossy needs to be Satin - Help!!

[floorscrubber]

long story - please be paitent...... laid very pourous black slate effect ceramic floor tiles and applied a satin sealer. Sealer looked fine on application but as soon as I washed them the tiles left a very white residue which we assumed was because the tiles were so pourous. We asked around and was told to use an impregnator.

Applied the impregnator (HG Impregnator) which is matt finish, however the impregnator has dried very glossy - i admit that I applied it quite generously!! It has been down now for 24 hours. Do you think that it still has a lot of drying to do or are we going to need to remove it and if we are what would you suggest to remove it to get a nice satin finish?



Thanks

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[Davestone]

Yikes, one bad move after another, heh? The first sealer may have been water based, or put on too thick, or not hardened enough for cleaning...you then maybe cleaned with something that reacted with the sealer,clouding, or degrading it.Then the addition of a penetrating sealer, which sealed in all the problems..by the way the penetrating sealer does just that, and shouldn't be allowed to thickly stand on the surface long, before wiping it in.You first need to reverse the process and begin to remove the impregnator, which may be almost impossible,see what the back of the bottle says.Hopefully it will also remove the first sealer in the process, otherwise you'll probably have to remove it also,again reading the bottle,then use a better quality first sealer, like above at TYW, or an Aquamix product.Black stones can be very tricky, they tend to go gray(like us) when there's trouble.

[floorscrubber]

Thanks for your speedy response - yep, disaster after disaster!!! We have today reached desperation. We had a good sniff of the impregnator and it actually smelt like white spirit - bare in mind we are at the stage where we believed we had absolutely nothing to lose, so with this in mind I grabbed a bottle of white spirt, took a deep breath and applied a generous amount to one tile - it appeared to remove almost every treatment we have used on the tiles over the past weeks. We let it dry out for a good while and then, just on the one tile, applied a new sealer (HG Sealer) - it dried and it looked really good. However, we will not kinow if it will take a clean without going white again - what do you think.

We have taken a huge chance and used white spirit on the rest of the kitchen floor - we have only just finished and at the moment the tiles are looking as near to the day that they came out of the box - do you think we should impregnate again? just seal them? or lay carpet!!!!!

Look forward to hearing from you.
Jackie B

[Davestone]

I think the cure will be to apply the sealer strictly to the instructions on the bottle...i.e. not so much it puddles, and wipe with a dry rag so's it doesn,t doesn't gloss over on the surface.Now that you've got a good remover(and i never heard of spirit) you can practice.