Out Of The Hospital

 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 😳).

 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.