Natural stone is the most beautiful choice when installing new floors, kitchen counter tops, vanities, and showers in your home. There are 1000's of different colors and choices when it comes to natural stone. There are marbles like Serpentine, White Carrera, Botticino, or Rosa Perlino. Granites like Jet Black, Baltic Brown, Counter White, or Deer Isle. Maybe you chose a stone like Travertine or
Limestone. When you chose natural stone you expected it's natural beauty and elegance to last a
lifetime. With proper care natural stone will last forever. Through no fault of your own many hard surfaces can experience problems with wear, etching, improper cleaning agents, scratches, or loss of shine. In most cases this damage can be restored and brought back to "Like New" condition.
Let's cover the major points in getting your natural stone surfaces looking new and beautiful again.
Cleaning
Obviously, all surfaces need to be cleaned on a regular basis. Not only for appearance, but for health and preservation of the natural stone. If you go to the Maintenance Guide on our website, we go into more detail about daily maintenance. Professional cleaning periodically is vital to maintaining a beautiful natural stone surface. Professional Maintenance Cleanings every 6 months to a Year will help maintain and preserve the natural stone
surface; especially floors. Cleaning followed by a light polishing or buffing will keep the hard surfaces looking beautiful and shining year round. Professional cleaning will get the grout lines looking good again too.
Restoration
Unfortunately, cleaning may not solve the more serious issues with your natural stone surfaces. Restoration may be needed before a "cleaning program" is to begin. Let's cover some points to determine if your natural stone needs to be restored. First, have an experienced professional from a stone restoration company inspect your hard surface
issues. This way you will know what can be restored and determine what needs to be done.
There are primarily 2 categories for restoration:
Simple Restoration
This refinishing of stone is known as the "2 Step Procedure". The first step involves Honing the very top of the
stone. With honing the top of the stone will be "filed away". This can eliminate most etching and some or all of the light scratches. Honing will bring some clarity back to the stone too. The second step of simple restoration is Polishing. Polishing is meant to produce a high gloss finish your floors, counter tops, showers, and vanities. This involves techniques not found in the stone manufacturing process. In most cases polishing can bring back the gloss to factory finish or close to it. Nonetheless the appearance will be much better.
3 Step Restoration
A natural stone surface may require the "3 Step Procedure" in order to have the hard surface properly restored. This may involve Grinding prior to Deep Honing and Polishing Procedures. This more aggressive procedure may need to be done if the surface has extreme etching, deep scratches, excessive wear and dulling. Tiles with "high edges" or lippage, may need to be ground down. Done properly the deep honing will bring back the beautiful clarity in the stone-thus producing an even better polish or gloss. You may even have what we call a Honed finish on the surface. This natural stone look has a lower sheen or matte finish. Honed or Polish is in the eyes of the beholder. Even though this procedure can solve most issues with floor damage; areas with deep scratches, gouges, or nicks may need to be repaired or filled. This will all depend on the make-up or integrity of the stone.
At Midwest Clean Care, you can give us a call today at 815.436.9139 or 800.499.5557, or click here to request a quote online and we will gladly give you a FREE, absolutely no-obligation inspection and price quote on natural stone restoration.
