Wheelers Natural Beeswax Floor Polish

The living room floor has involved a lot of hard graft and now looks pretty amazing and I wanted to keep it that way as after spending a LOT of time removing the carpets, grippa rods, filling in the nail holes, sanding back the un-glazed floor tiles (my house has a concrete floor), I painted the tiles a rich chocolate brown then finished off with a coat of hard wearing varnish (I was aiming for a buffed beaten leather look) – the last thing I wanted was for the floor to look dull.
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I was in HomeSense when I saw their small selection of cleaning products, one being a floor polish suitable for tiled floors made by Wheelers. As it was only £1.99 instead of £4.99 AND it had a sticker of Aggie – ones of the Queens of Grime – endorsing the product, I thought it’d be good as I’ve got one of their Natural Beeswax Furniture Creams which did good job of my dark wooden coffee table (which as it no longer matched the new style of the room, was handed to a friend). Oddly, the bottle I have contains a thick dark brown cream, yet the website shows the product as being white. I’ve also used their Leather Balm thick cream which works well too so I had high hopes.
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A few days later I tried it...then spent over an hour rectifying the nasty oogy mess it left of my living room floor.
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How’s it work?
Pour a small amount of the thin white liquid on to a soft cloth, apply to floor, then buff to a high sheen with a clean soft cloth.
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How it actually works...
After applying to the floor it leaves a tacky milky cover. It refuses point blank to buff to any kind of sheen and feels soft-tacky to the touch, like when you are standing on a grubby tube carriage and your feet get semi-stuck in a dried puddle of fizzy drink. Or worse.
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What next?
To rectify I initially tried wiping the floor down with a wet cloth, but this just didn’t remove the polish, it just made things worse as I now had diluted polish over a far wider expanse of floor. I had to fill a bucket with hot water and a liberal squirt of washing-up liquid, then set to with the scrubby side of the floor mop. I then had to go over again with a bucket of clear water and THEN once dried, I actually applied my M&S window cleaner spray (which incidentally is *fantastic* not just on windows but tables, TV stands and my floor), which eventually left the floor sparkly – this was all before the DFS men arrived with my sofa, so I was in quite a panicky-flap.
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Could it have been you doing it wrong then?
Well, I did think that possibly applying the polish to a painted floor might have been what caused the problem, so as I have a number of tiled areas in my house – a glazed terracotta (bleurgh) tiled porch, white matt ceramic floor tiles in my kitchen and white/pale grey weirdly textured glazed floor tiles in my bathroom, I thought I’d give it a whirl on each of those surfaces – and the results are:-
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Porch glazed terracotta = Dulls tiles, although being terracotta, that’s no bad thing! (please dull them to dark grey slate....).
Matt ceramic kitchen tiles = Makes them even duller, initially makes them slippery as hell, then they get a ‘grubby grip’ to them which smears easily and the mogs leave little paw prints all over them from their hot little toes.
Textured glazed bathroom tiles = Dulls tiles.
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Riiiight. So, it wasn’t you, it was the product then.
Yes, it certainly was and although it really galls me to throw things away – I was brought up to clear my plate and always eek out the final drips and splodges of toothpaste, soaps and shampoos, but this, this had to be thrown in the bin. Aggie, what were you thinking?
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Recommended?
No. Off to hunt for a non-smearing, leaves floor shiny cleaner.


http://www.beewaxed.com/

Postscript......
Oddly, the ‘how to’ instructions are totally different on the website, where it tells you to apply with a damp cloth, allow to dry and not to buff. This could work, but to be honest, I’m still going to rate it down for the simple fact that people don’t buy a product, read the instructions then think “I know, I’ll just visit the website to see if their product description corresponds with the description on the bottle”, not only that, I really don’t think I could go through the hassle of ‘polishing’ my floors, only for them to end up duller than before I started.