Terrazzo grinding and honing

What grinding does, and what it does not

Grinding takes the surface back past the wax, the old sealer and most staining, and levels out the damage that sits in the top of the floor. It's not a panacea, but it fixes many problems people think are permanent.

Some issues, like pad damage from certain kinds of old carpet pad and severe grid lines from vinyl tile can go deeper than we can safely grind.

We'll give you the best idea of which you're facing when we come out to inspect the floor.

Honing is where the finish is actually made

Honing and polishing are one continuous idea: each pass replaces the scratch pattern left by the previous pass with a smaller one, down to roughly 7 microns. That progression is what produces a high gloss surface with a high clarity reflection instead of a bright but splotchy one.

Shorten that sequence and the result is visible in ordinary conditions. The floor reads lower contrast, and reflections come back cloudy and uneven rather than sharp. It is not subtle once you know to look.

Tooling matters

Diamond tooling comes in all types and for all budgets. We always use the tooling we have tested and found to be best, run in the right order, at the right stage. Quality shows up directly in the clarity of the finished surface.

We standardized on ours after years of testing, and we do not shorten the progression to save time.