Polished Marble Floor Restoration

Polished marble floors can be a thing of real beauty, no wonder that so many people desire them. But they can also be a little tricky to look after. The basic rules to maintaining a polished marble floor are the same as for any stone really: Keep it free of grit, pick up isolated spills as they occur, use a mild/neutral cleaner in place of high alkaline detergents for regular cleaning and on no account expose it to any kind of acid.

However, being a realist, I appreciate that despite our best endeavours this is not always possible and accidents do happen. So what does happen to marble floors? The following are common issues:

1. Staining

2. Etching

3. Wear/scratches and chips

Staining is largely preventable through first using an appropriate impregnating sealer from day one, especially if the area is a high risk of stains area like a kitchen. Furthermore, keeping the surface maintained in good condition will also help as a well polished marble is usually pretty hard to stain (compared with say an unpolished marble). Should you have a stain to deal with then a good alkaline cleaner or use of a poultice could solve the problem for you.

The other two issues are a little harder to deal with potentially, as the both involve damage to the surface of the stone. Etching, is the removal of tiny particles of the surface as a result of exposure to acidic compounds, and that can mean seemingly harmless household liquids such as orange juice or coffee, red wine and lemon juice are particularly aggressive and will damage polished marble surfaces in no time at all.

Scratches need no explanation hopefully, here again, some stone is physically removed. Depending on the amount of damage, it may or may not be easy or practical to do a diy repair. General wear will occur at a rate consistent with the amount and type of traffic to which the floor or surface is subjected. Usually floors will dull down over time as the factory shine is worn away.

Very fine scratches and fine etching such as from perfume bottles and rings from wine glasses on worktops, or minor spillages on floors, (resulting in spot-etches) can often be repaired with a good hand polishing cream such as Renue by Aqua Mix.

However anything deeper is likely to require the services of a stone restoration professional. I say this not because it is rocket science but the type of equipment required to do the job well is very specialised and very very expensive. Plus, unskilled hands can cause a lot of damage very quickly. The types of repair work that can be done include, removing small etches and scratches locally, restoring the factory shine after it has been dulled through use and wear, repairing veins and missing grout to more involved and time-consuming work like removing lippage (where the marble tiles were not set true and flat, and adjacent tiles may be varying in height by a few mm in relation to each other, creating little steps). This involves cutting the floor back, to below the level of the damage, or in the case of lippage, grinding back the floor to a uniform and flat plane. Once this is done the floor has to be re-polished in several passes using different grades of diamond blocks, until the factory shine is restored. It can be an expensive process, but if you have a beautiful marble floor, that is showing signs of age and neglect, it may be well worth the investment.

Copyright Ian Taylor and The Tile and Stone Blog.co.uk, 2013. See copyright notice above.