A linoleum floor in a school corridor, laid six years ago, documented as a high-quality installation. Today it is dull, patchy and darker along the traffic lanes than beside them. The school says the contractor cleans badly. The contractor says there has been no deep clean in six years, and that nobody commissioned one either. Both are in earnest, and both are partly right.
Cases like this reach us when two sides cannot agree and somebody from outside has to say what is actually there. What regularly emerges is uncomfortable for everyone involved: the cause usually cannot be traced back to a single careless act. Several things work together, and it almost always starts with nobody having settled which surface is treated with what.
What the floor shows and what it does not
A distinction first, because without it the whole discussion goes askew. A damage pattern is what you see or feel. Dull, greyed, patchy, rough, scratched. The cause is not contained in it.
Because the same appearance can come from very different directions: from the cleaning method, from use, from a damaged factory finish, from moisture in the substrate, from laying or material defects, from missing or worn furniture glides, from an incomplete builder's clean, or from plain wear.
There is a second distinction as well, and in a dispute it decides a great deal of money. Soiling is what can be removed with the right method. Wear is the use-related change within the expected service life, for which nobody has to answer. Damage is the impairment that goes beyond that. A dull floor can be all three, and the answer emerges only from an examination.
How damage arises without anyone working carelessly
Cleaners work with what is there. The product in the store. The dilution somebody once demonstrated. The method that worked in the last building.
Where nobody has settled which surface is treated with what, the decision gets made at the bucket, although professionally it should long since have been made in the cleaning concept. It is then not careless; it is uninformed. And because the effect builds over months, nobody notices while something could still be changed.
The client sees the result after two years. By that point the route to it can hardly be reconstructed, and the dispute begins.
Four damage patterns we see again and again
The greyed surface
The floor looks matt, dirty, neglected, and does not come back to its original state even after a deep clean. Behind it usually sits a built-up film of polish residue with soil embedded in it.
Typical cause: dosed too high, water changed too rarely, polish applied more often than it is taken off. Each individual operation is unremarkable. After a year the film is there.
Other causes with a similar appearance do come into consideration, though, and they are not mutually exclusive: residues from mop water changed too rarely, very hard water, an old coating not fully removed, fine abrasion in a surface already opened up, or unsuitable mop textiles. Anyone fixing the finding on appearance alone will be wrong in a proportion of cases.
What stands out when you examine the process: in many buildings polish is applied and a deep clean never carried out. Where a polish layer is used, the cycle of building up and taking off is then only half present. There are floor systems, however, for which the manufacturer envisages no polish layer at all. There the build-up itself would already be the mistake.
Linoleum under chemical attack
Linoleum is a natural product with a linseed oil base and reacts sensitively to strongly alkaline products. Manufacturers usually specify neutral products for routine cleaning, frequently with a pH ceiling in the region of 9. Where work is done consistently above that, the surface loses its integrity: it goes dull, absorbs soil and becomes ever harder to clean. What follows is the second mistake, because the dilution gets increased on the grounds that it no longer comes clean.
The matter is finer than the word alkaline suggests. There are intensive and deep cleaners in the alkaline range that the manufacturer expressly approves for particular linoleum systems at particular dilutions. What is decisive is the specific product, its factory finish, the concentration, the contact time and the mechanical action. And you have to distinguish what has been attacked: the polish layer, the factory finish or the covering itself.
How far it can be recovered depends on the stage. As long as only the polish layer is affected, a deep clean followed by a fresh build-up helps. Once the surface itself has changed, that is, the binder has been dissolved and the structure opened, even the best deep clean will not bring it back. What remains then is refurbishment, and that costs a multiple of what the right chemistry would have cost across the whole period.
The pattern becomes recognisable in the traffic lanes. Where the surface is open, soil embeds itself and can no longer be wiped out, while the edge zones with an intact polish build-up stay lighter and more closed. The trafficked zone therefore appears darker and duller than the area beside it, not lighter.
Then comes the finding at which many discussions turn: the damage is worst where cleaning is most frequent. The area treated most intensively shows the strongest damage pattern.
The scratched resilient floor
PVC and vinyl are softer than they seem. The wrong choice of pad, over-coarse cleaning bodies, dirty machines or missing entrance matting lead to fine scratches that accumulate into dull traffic lanes.
Some of the causes lie not in the cleaning at all but before it. What is not caught at the entrance gets pushed across the floor every day, and a short matting zone picks up considerably less than an adequately dimensioned one. Add to that sand from building works nearby, worn furniture glides, castors on trolleys and furniture being moved.
Dull natural stone in sanitary areas
Marble and limestone are acid-sensitive because of their carbonate content. For terrazzo this does not hold across the board but depends on the binder, the aggregates, the surface treatment and any protective treatment applied. Sanitary cleaners are frequently acidic because they are meant to dissolve limescale, and that is precisely where the collision lies. The two together produce a damage pattern presenting as a dull, slightly rough surface, usually around wash basins and in shower areas, where the work is done most thoroughly.
Here too nobody has been slapdash. It was the wrong product in the wrong place, and the cleaner does exactly what it was made for.
What an expert report contributes
Where two sides disagree, the question is rarely whether damage exists. It is visible. The question is what caused it, and on that hangs who pays for it.
We proceed in four steps on an assessment:
Finding. What is present, where exactly, in what form. Documented, referenced to specific areas rather than as a general impression.
Distribution. Where does the damage occur and where does it not? The distribution is often more informative than the damage itself. Damage occurring exclusively in the intensively cleaned areas points in a different direction from damage distributed evenly throughout. That is not yet proof, because intensively cleaned areas are usually also the more heavily trafficked, more heavily soiled and mechanically more stressed ones. Comparison areas therefore always go with it: areas with the same covering and different use, and places under furniture or in corners that were never reached.
Comparison with the contract. What was commissioned? Which methods, which products, which intervals? And what was actually done, so far as that can be reconstructed from records, material orders and conversations?
Assessment. Only here does a statement about the cause arise. And it frequently comes out divided: part method error, part missing specification, part building condition. What an expert report can deliver is a finding on which causes come into professional consideration, which can be excluded and how they weigh against each other. Who has to answer for it follows in addition from the contract, from areas of responsibility and from the burden of proof, and thus from a legal assessment.
That division is usually the usable result. It permits a solution, whereas a one-sided verdict merely postpones the dispute.
What can be secured while it is still possible
The evidential position in such cases is usually worse than it needs to be. Nobody has concealed anything. It simply never occurred to anyone that the question would one day be asked.
Three things can hardly be reconstructed later and can be recorded today with little effort.
Which products were actually used. What counts is what stands in the building's store, not the list from the tender. A photograph of the containers with their labels, together with the technical data sheets, and in the version that applied at the time of use. Formulations change, and a data sheet from the internet may three years later describe a different product.
The condition at a defined point in time. Photographs of an area are only usable where the position, direction of view and lighting are reproducible. Go through systematically once at handover of the building and you have a basis for comparison later. Without it, the assertion that the covering was "better before" stands against the assertion that it was already dull at handover.
The material records. Order quantities across the contract term are hard to fabricate afterwards, which makes them a serviceable plausibility check. Where no deep cleaner at all was purchased for 4,000 square metres of linoleum over two years, that is worth asking about. Proof it is not: material may come from existing stock, be purchased across several buildings or be sourced through a subcontractor, and on some floor systems a deep cleaner is not envisaged at all.
On an assessment we work with what exists. The less of it there is, the larger the share of the finding that can only be expressed as a probability.
Why it almost always ends up at the cleaning concept
In most of the cases we assess, the same thing is missing: a determination of which surface is treated by which method.
The specification of services describes rooms, areas and intervals. It rarely describes which floor covering is where and what it tolerates. For the quantity structure of a tender that suffices. For operations it does not, and nobody notices as long as nothing happens.
A cleaning concept closes that gap. It records which coverings and surfaces are present in the building, which methods are suitable for them, where a deep clean is needed and at what interval, and what expressly must not be used. It is not a lengthy document, but it determines the service life of surfaces that count for a good deal in the value of the building.
In the proper order of things it would make sense to draw up the cleaning concept before the damage. In practice it is usually the other way round, and the expert report is then the occasion for finally doing it.
What you can check yourself
Three things you need nobody for:
Walk through your building and see whether the damage is worst where the cleaning is most frequent. If so, you have a clear indication of a method-related cause. Then check next whether those areas are also more heavily used, because both explanations then come into consideration.
Check whether the contract states how which surfaces are treated. In most contracts it does not.
Ask when the last deep clean was and which care system is envisaged for this covering at all. If nobody can answer either question, you know at least that the building's floor care has been running without a basis for years.