Terrazzo Restoration in Tampa and Hillsborough County

Tampa Terrazzo Restoration grinds, patches, polishes and seals the original terrazzo in Hillsborough County’s mid-century concrete block houses. A full grind, hone and polish typically runs $5 to $9 per square foot, carpet and glue removal $2 to $3 per square foot, tile and thinset removal $4 to $6 per square foot, and hole and crack patches $75 to $250 each. Most houses with 1,000 to 1,500 square feet of carpeted terrazzo land between $7,000 and $18,000. Send us a photo of a closet corner with the carpet folded back and we will tell you what we see and where your floor sits in those ranges.

We do one thing: bring back cement terrazzo the way it was finished in the first place, with diamonds and water, not with a bottle of shine. That floor is half an inch or so of marble chips set in cement, poured over the slab, divided by metal strips and ground flat. Treated right, it outlasts the house. Painted with a coating, it looks wet and new for a year and then turns yellow and starts peeling.

What we do

• Terrazzo restoration: the whole job on a covered or neglected floor, from the first pulled tack strip to the last coat of sealer.
• Grinding and polishing: metal-bond diamonds to flatten the floor and cut off glue and stains, resin-bond diamonds to bring the finish up to satin or gloss.
• Crack and hole repair: tack-strip holes, old plumbing holes, cracks along the strips, and the strip of bare slab left where someone took out a wall.
• Carpet, tile and glue removal: getting the terrazzo out from under forty years of other floors without gouging it.
• Stain and rust removal: poultice work on the rings and blotches that survive the grind.
• Sealing and maintenance: a penetrating sealer and a cleaning routine that does not etch the cement.
• Flood-damaged terrazzo: floors left bare after storm water ruined the carpet or vinyl on top.

Where Tampa’s terrazzo actually is

The county records answer this better than any rule of thumb. The Hillsborough County Property Appraiser lists an “Interior Flooring” value for every house, and one of the values is Terrazzo. We pulled 1,103 single-family records across 26 street searches chosen to hit every part of our service area. Of the 464 houses built between 1950 and 1972, 105 list terrazzo. Of the 595 built in 1973 or later, not one does. Of the 41 built before 1950, none. Every terrazzo listing in the sample was built between 1954 and 1970. The full method and the raw rows are explained on our property-record guide.

That window lines up with the boom. Tampa’s census count went from 124,681 in 1950 to 274,970 in 1960, and Hillsborough County went from 249,894 to 397,788 over the same ten years. The University of Florida’s survey of postwar Florida housing quotes House and Home magazine in 1960 describing the typical Florida house as “built on slabs, terrazzo or resilient tile floors” and 99 percent concrete block. The same survey says block was the preferred material for Florida houses from the 1940s into the 1970s and was giving way to wood by the 1970s. Terrazzo went out with it.

Where that shows up on the ground:

• Town ‘n’ Country: the LaMonte-Shimberg Corporation bought a 525-acre dairy farm in 1958 for Town ‘n’ Country Park and built nearly 8,000 homes by 1978. In the 1960 to 1966 Golden Estates houses on Comanche Avenue, half of the records we pulled list terrazzo.
• Carrollwood: founded in 1959 around Lake Carroll, with more than 900 homes built by 1970. In Carrollwood Subdivision Units 1 and 2, 18 of the 55 records list terrazzo.
• Temple Terrace: a 1920s Mediterranean Revival town that filled in with block houses after the war; 10 of 45 Temple Terrace Estates records from 1950 to 1972 list terrazzo.
• Forest Hills: citrus grove until the 1950s, then block houses along Country Club Drive by the Babe Zaharias course.
• Sun City Center: Del Webb opened it on January 1, 1962. Along Pebble Beach Boulevard, 12 of the 55 late-1960s houses we pulled list terrazzo.
• Brandon, Plant City and Apollo Beach: thinner, older pockets inside towns that mostly grew later.

What is not terrazzo country is worth saying too. Seminole Heights is a bungalow suburb that dates from 1911, a generation before the terrazzo years, and none of the 41 pre-1950 houses in our sample listed terrazzo. The 1980s Northdale street we sampled returned zero terrazzo records, and so did the 1980s and newer houses we sampled on Interbay in South Tampa. If your house was built after about 1972, what you have is probably not cement terrazzo, and we will say so from the photo.

The usual list when the carpet comes up

A Hillsborough floor that spent thirty or forty years under carpet tends to show the same things:

• Tack strip and its holes around every room, often with an orange ring around each nail. The tack-strip holes page covers what grinds out and what gets filled.
• Glue, sometimes a gray latex pad adhesive and sometimes black mastic from old vinyl tile, which has to be tested before anyone grinds it. See black glue and mastic.
• Tile set right on the terrazzo in kitchens and baths, which leaves a pitted, ridged surface when it comes off.
• Cracks following the divider strips or running across rooms, and hollow spots where the topping has let go of the slab.
• Old coatings from the 1970s and 1980s, now yellow, and etched dull patches from years of vinegar mopping.

None of that is a reason to give up on the floor. It is the reason a photo of the actual floor matters more than the square footage. If you can already see your problem, the problems section takes each one in turn with the check you can do yourself and the typical cost.

After Helene and Milton

Hillsborough took both storms within two weeks in 2024: Helene on September 26 and Milton on October 9. Helene’s surge set a record of 7.2 feet above the normal high-tide line at the National Weather Service’s East Bay gauge, with 5 to 8 feet elsewhere along the county’s coast, and WUSF reported 7 feet of water pushed through the streets of Town ‘n’ Country. The county estimated $1.8 billion in residential damage. Milton came two weeks later with 10 to 15 inches of rain over most of the county, 18.82 inches near Westchase, and record crests on the Hillsborough River.

For terrazzo the lesson was a good one. The carpet, pad and vinyl came out to the curb; the terrazzo underneath was still there. What it needs after a flood is a thorough rinse to get the salt and silt out, time for the slab to dry, and a moisture check before any sealer goes on. That sequence is on our flood-damaged terrazzo page.

How we restore a floor

1. Expose and look. Carpet, pad, strip, tile and adhesive come up. We look at chip size, matrix color, cracks, hollow spots and old coatings before the price is written down.
2. Repair. Holes and cracks are cleaned out and filled with matched chips in a tinted matrix. The NTMA restoration specification calls for aggregate in any crack wider than a quarter inch, and so do we.
3. Grind. Metal-bond diamonds on a planetary grinder flatten the floor and take off glue, stains and the dead top layer. We grind wet or with vacuum shrouds to keep silica dust down.
4. Hone and polish. Resin-bond diamonds step up through the grits to the sheen you pick, from a soft satin to a high gloss.
5. Seal. A penetrating sealer that soaks into the cement instead of sitting on top. Then plain water and a pH-neutral cleaner from then on.

Typical prices

The pricing page explains what pushes a job up or down each range, and the floor cost estimator does the arithmetic for your floor.

Permits and who can do this work

Restoring a floor does not usually need a permit here. The City of Tampa’s building code lists floor covering among work that needs no building permit regardless of cost, and Hillsborough County’s exempt-work list includes floor coverings as well. The exception is flood repair in a Special Flood Hazard Area in the unincorporated county: the county’s recovery guide says cosmetic repairs need no permit but do need a Substantial Damage Packet filed for review.

Florida also does not license terrazzo work as its own trade. Section 489.117(4)(a) of the Florida Statutes bars local governments from requiring a license for “decorative stone, tile, marble, granite, or terrazzo installation,” along with flooring and painting. That means anyone can call themselves a terrazzo company, so ask any contractor, us included, for proof of insurance and for a plain description of the method: diamond grinding and a penetrating sealer, or a coating.

Getting a number

Send three things through the form: a photo of a closet corner with the carpet folded back, a close shot of the worst spot with a coin beside it, and the rough square footage. You get a range from the published prices and a straight answer about what will grind out and what will only fade. More questions are answered on the FAQ, and about us explains how we work.