Back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s I used to repair and replace flooring in commercial restaurant kitchens – mostly steakhouses. I would tear out sheet rubber flooring, many different kinds of epoxy flooring, and quarry tile flooring and replace it with new quarry tile flooring. You should see what was underneath these floors – worms crawling around inside black fluid that accumulated from years of use – decomposing meat mixed with fryer oil and dishwasher detergent – it was quite an unpleasant smell and sight.

 I traveled the country (and internationally) and worked in facilities in more states than not. Mostly I worked in restaurants and vet clinics but also I worked in other facilities too. 

 One evening I was working at a project in Jacksonville not too far from where I lived – at the time I lived in Lake City Florida. So I was only one hour from home. I’m not certain what I got into but we were disconnecting and removing a cookline and there was lots of pieces of meat underneath this equipment. We then removed the floor and replaced it. We had to do this overnight in small sections at a time, because the steakhouse remained open for the floor replacement. But I must have not been careful enough with my personal protective equipment that night because somehow I contracted a very scary allergic reaction (I think) that caused my lips to swell up. They just kept swelling up and wouldn’t stop. I left the guys in the middle of the project and headed to a hospital where they spent quite some time trying to figure out what was going on. Finally, they came up with some sort of concoction and injected it into me.

I then went home and stayed there for a few days and fortunately my lips did go back to normal (or, sortof normal 😳).

 While in the hospital I was pondering life. I thought, how safe were these places? My crew is in all these restaurant kitchens and grocery stores with protective gear working on their floors, when the places often still have customers inside, employees working there, and food out and uncovered. Not right in the exact spots that where we were working, of course, but still in the same building. Airbourne contaminants are a real thing. Splashes happen – and before we got there, people were walking all over these same floors every day preparing and serving people food. I had a “crack in my armor” just one night and almost lost my lips – what about all the other people all over the country who are eating and working in these public places?

 I started to worry about all the people and how many times someone gets sick - was it because they were exposed to a contamination at a public place, due to broken and cracked floors. I wanted to do more for the greater good – not just help with flooring repairs, but help solve a nationwide pandemic caused by unsanitary public facility back-of-house floors.

 This is why 15 years ago I assembled a team of formulators to create Everlast Floor - a healthy, durable, and safe epoxy flooring.

 ---David Linton, CEO of Everlast Epoxy

www.everlastepoxy.com

Dedicated to doing our part to improve the health of the Public by providing the cleanest, healthiest, and safest flooring in many businesses and facilities they frequent – so that when they frequent a restaurant, clinic, recreational, or other public facility that the place has clean floors resulting in clean food to eat and clean air to breathe. We know that a hard to clean or porous floor is a breeding ground for bacteria, germs, and viruses which can get kicked or blown up into the air and both spread airborne diseases and contaminate food. Our mission is to install seamless and cleanable floors in public facilities in every community in the USA and Canada.