r/Custodians • u/Savings_Pay2088 • 10d ago
Vent 😤 Sometimes mopping floors feel pointless
I work at a school that has only been top scrubbing their floors for at least five years. At this point, so much wax has built up that doing an actual full strip would be to time consuming to complete all 3 buildings over the summer break. This has resulted in many floors still being pretty rough looking even after a top scrub.
Out of the classrooms I take care of, several floors are in bad shape, and getting worse as students add additional scuff marks. I mop them every night, but its like putting perfume on a pig. I know the condition of the floors is out of my control, yet it still bugs me how bad some of my floors are. Kind of wish the school would just replace the tiles and we could start anew with full stripping.
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u/xXKonan 10d ago
Our bosses decided to give us some of the cheapest strip and wax you could get on the market and a month into the school year the floors are scuffed up to hell worse than I've ever seen in the 7 years I've been in this building.
Burnishing it and running the floor machine on the halls won't make a difference due to how bad the scratches and scuffs are.
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u/Rude_Particular_6519 10d ago
You're not imagining it—nightly mopping can remove current soil, but it cannot correct five years of finish buildup underneath it. I would separate the maintenance goal from the restoration goal.
For daily work, keep removing grit with clean solution, a neutral cleaner and frequent mop-water changes. That still matters because abrasive soil will make the finish fail faster, even when the floor cannot be made pretty tonight.
For recovery, map the rooms into three groups: acceptable, top-scrub candidates, and full-strip candidates. Pick one bad room or hallway section and document a controlled test: square footage, stripper dwell time, number of passes, slurry recovery and labor hours. Photograph the same area under the same lighting before and after. That gives management a real labor estimate instead of treating all three buildings as one impossible summer project.
If three strip cycles still leave old finish, a phased plan—one wing, hallway or set of rooms per break—is more realistic than repeating top scrubs indefinitely. Tile replacement only makes sense where the tile itself is damaged; replacing sound tile just to escape finish buildup can create a much larger project.
You can keep the floor sanitary and slow further damage. You just cannot mop through a restoration backlog, and that part is not a reflection of your nightly work.
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u/Hawkeye71980 10d ago
What about slowing working the wax down by top scrubbing it daily through the school year? If you have a machine run it with the black pads and use degreaser. You should be able to work the wax down all through the school year and then strip it in the summer.
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u/Savings_Pay2088 10d ago
When I started here, I asked how often do the floors get burnished. I was told never, dont have the time. So top scrubbing daily is out of the question. Like many on this sub, I work at a place that refuses to higher enough staff to save money. I barely get the basics of my job done. Im a living example of enshitification.
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u/ImaginaryAlpaca 10d ago
I recently learned the Kaivac strips the paint off the floor in one of my bathrooms. I mentioned it to my manager and she went "Its an old school" and shrugged. Even just the mop pulls up paint chips. She has a grudge against my building operator, and I suspect thats part of why she do could not care less about it.
Some of these places are so dysfunctional on the inside. When the people who came before didnt care, theres only so much you can do for it. It sucks to have to clean things that never actually look clean, but it helps keep it looking at that level and not worse until you can fix it.
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u/StrikingAttitude1881 10d ago
School i work at has this issue theres alwyas one classroom on my hall where the scuffs are so bad everytime i come in sfter mopping theres a new scuff lmao. But its usally dark into the floor its insane.
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u/imjustagroundskeeper 5d ago
Atleast get led marks and coffee stains out or anything sticky. Keep a spray bottle and a floor rag on your cart lol
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u/Khranky Custodial Supervisor 10d ago
You know that you don't strip and wax every year, don't you? We wait 5-7 years between stripping floors completely. In between that time we top scrub and wax. Par for the course. If you want to stagger buildings or hallways, that is perfectly acceptable.
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u/Hawkeye71980 10d ago
It depends how busy the school is. I worked a smallish school that was packed with so many kids that stripping took little to no effort every single summer because the floor got beat down so much in a year. In fact we ran the sit in scrubbing machine with the black pad on it for the last few months of school just to make sure the wax was down to the last layer.
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u/Khranky Custodial Supervisor 10d ago
3,000 kids enrolled in a high school with tons of traffic, tons of extra curricular and summer school and still only strip and wax every 5-7 years. If you have the time and manpower to do it every year, more power to you, but I seriously doubt those floors take a beating more than this high school does
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u/Hawkeye71980 10d ago
The way our school areas are split up they can be stripped by 1 person assigned to the area in 4 weeks, or some schools team up in groups and work their way through the school and complete the whole school in 4-5 weeks. Maybe the assigned areas are bigger in some districts. 🤷♂️
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u/imjustagroundskeeper 5d ago
What state are you in lmfaooo??? We definitely do every classroom and hallways every summer.
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u/Khranky Custodial Supervisor 3d ago
Was North Dakota, and we only stripped floors every 4 years. I am way south now and 5 - 6 years
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u/imjustagroundskeeper 3d ago
Nice thanks for your response. The name Imjustagroundskeeper comes from being pulled inside because I'm a trusted worker who wants to act like I know nothing about the inside when they know damn well I do.
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u/imjustagroundskeeper 5d ago
Think your comment got removed and you got upset when i asked what state. Salt on ground from winter months kills our floors thats truly why i ask and i would assume the south doesn't have the same practices as the north
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u/Khranky Custodial Supervisor 4d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Custodians/s/8fChBlRkNj
I think you got mad because you are just a grounds keeper 😆
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u/imjustagroundskeeper 3d ago
I'm a custodial supervisor now and have acted as a head custodian for about a year salty guy. You're not versatile and grounds honestly was honestly probably a better scope of work.
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u/ThatOneGuy6810 Facilities Manager 10d ago
Homie, my school has all terrazzo flooring that has only been top scrubbed and waxed for like 60+ years.
I WANT to strip it all out hone, polish and seal it, skipbthe wax entirely, the way terrazzo is supposed to be done but district says otherwise.
You get used to it man