Contact Us
Delivery & Returns
Remote Support
My Account
By the time the last bus pulls out before winter break, your floors have carried a full semester. Wet sneakers from fall storms, dropped trays outside the cafeteria, red clay tracked through the front entrance every morning since August. The finish in the main hallway is worn through, and you can see the traffic lanes from the front office.
Then you get about two weeks.
Winter break is the one stretch of the school year when a crew can strip a floor to bare tile, let it dry, and lay new finish without working around students. Miss it, and those floors wait until summer. Plan it well, and students walk back in January onto floors that hold up through spring testing season.
Start planning in November
The work happens in December. The decisions happen now.
Walk your building this month and look for the places that take the most abuse. In most schools that means the main entrance and vestibule, the cafeteria and serving line, the halls outside the gym and locker rooms, and any corridor that moves a whole grade at once. Note where the finish has gone dull, where black scuff marks won't come up with a mop, and where the floor has turned cloudy or yellow along the edges.
Rough square footage by area is enough for a crew to scope the job and tell you how many days it will take. If you manage more than one campus, rank them. The building with the heaviest traffic or the earliest event in January goes first.
Then book. Every district in the region is working against the same winter calendar, and crews fill their December schedules early.
What the work actually involves
Most school hallways and classrooms are vinyl composition tile, and restoring it is several jobs in a row, not one.
We move furniture out and sweep. Then we strip: a stripping solution goes down, sits, and a machine scrubs the old finish and ground-in dirt off the tile. We rinse and neutralize the floor so the new finish bonds instead of peeling. Once it's dry, we lay down coats of finish, letting each one cure before the next. Then we burnish to harden the surface and bring up the shine.
Not every floor needs a full strip. A floor that's still in decent shape may only need a deep scrub and recoat, which adds fresh finish without removing what's there. Part of walking the building with us is deciding which areas need which, so you aren't paying to strip a hallway that only needed a recoat.
Entrances deserve their own plan. Most of what wears down a school floor comes in on shoes, so the right matting at each door protects every hallway behind it.
Keeping them that way after January
A refinished floor starts losing ground the first morning students come back. What happens next decides whether the December work lasts until May or until February.
Daily cleaning is where that's won or lost. Herald's Facility Solutions team runs custodial and floor care programs, and we operate autonomous cleaning machines that scrub long hallways and cafeterias on a set route and schedule. That frees your custodial staff for the work that needs a person.
Supplies matter too. We stock the floor-safe concentrates, can liners and dispensers your custodians use every day, matched to the finish we just put down.
We strip the floors in December. Then we keep the building stocked. The same team does both.
Book your winter break floor care
Now is the time to schedule. Contact Herald's Facility Solutions team to walk your building, scope the work, and hold your dates before they're gone.
Call 843.774.5155 or email facilitiesservices@herald.group.
Building Lasting Partnerships.
