Beware of Cheap Stone, it may cost your dear in the long-run

“The bitter taste of poor quality lingers long after the sweet taste of low price is forgotten”

So goes the oft-quoted saying (or a version of it), but more often than not, they are wise words. Buying stone is no different; for many years having stone in your home was somewhat of a luxury. Granite work-surfaces and counter tops have not always been as widespread and affordable as they are now and it was not that long ago when a limestone floor was more likely to be seen in some old French castle than in a suburban kitchen.

Over relatively recent years there have been a number of advancements in the way stone is produced and fabricated, for example, high-tech computer-aided cutting machines have brought labour-saving, fast and accurate machining. Greater demand and growing prosperity (until recently anyway) has also brought price competition and a race to find new interesting varieties to the market. It has also fuelled the search for ever-cheaper stone.

Globalisation has also opened up markets to which access was less easy before and so this in turn has brought many new varieties of stone into the market. For example, we now have multi-coloured slate and sandstone from India. Then there is the limestone and travertine from Turkey and a plethora of slate quartzite and granites from China.

In fact, today the amount of stone removed from the earth through quarrying is staggering. However, with this massive growth, we have also seen a huge variety in quality. How do you define the quality of a stone? – Well it depends, but one way is to grade it, some producers use numbers, others letters etc. So for example you could have grades 1 through 3. Does this mean that grade 1 is ok whereas grade 3 is rubbish? – not necessarily.

In come cases the grading relates mainly to aesthetics; no stone is completely 100% uniform and you can take samples of the same stone, from various parts of the same quarry and they will look very different. They are of course natural materials and so will vary considerably. Some stones have a lot of variety others have very little. In the case of a highly variable stone it may be grades as follows:

Little or no veining- grade 1

Some veining and colour variation – grade 2

Lots of veins and colour variation – grade 3

In the above case, there may be little or no difference in terms of the stone’s physical qualities (all could be equally suitable for flooring for example). In this case it is just a way of splitting the stone up into colour or shading groups, and so effectively offering more than one ‘product’ from the one quarry. The grade 1 may well be more expensive but this may have more to do with scarcity or the effort required to sort that material.

However there are also other grading systems, where the lower grades (especially when they use terms like commercial grade) really do indicate a difference in the stone’s suitability for certain situations. One common example is a lower or commercial grade of travertine. Travertine is a calcium/dolomite mineral based rock, the way it is formed results in the presence of holes throughout the stones structure (a bit like Swiss cheese). As a naturally occurring sedimentary rock, it can vary wildly, these variations can be aesthetic but it can also vary considerably in the size and distribution of the holes. Generally speaking the more holes in a travertine, the weaker it may be (especially if the holes are big and irregular). The problem is that as well as the ones you can see on the surface of the tiles (which by and large are filled either before tiling, or by grout during the tiling process) there can also be many more holes just under the surface. Depending on several things, including the competence of your Tiler, these holes may end up as potential weaknesses, often some time after tiling is finished, the thin amount of stone at the surface can receive a knock and it can cave in, revealing the hole.

This is not uncommon, even in the best quality Travertine, but coping with one or two small disruptions is one thing, I have seen some travertine floors where up to 50% of the floor essentially collapses to leave a mess of a floor. The problem here is that often the customer is just not aware of what they are buying, price competition and a misunderstanding of what they are buying has lead retailers, distributors and importers alike to buy cheaper and cheaper. Sometimes the stone supplier may be well aware that they are selling commercial grade, but they don’t always tell the customer, sometimes they may not be aware themselves, or think that the grade is purely an aesthetic one.

Needless to say, by buying cheap you can end up costing yourself a great deal of money and also heart-ache. I have been involved in advising in a number of disputes between customer, tile installer and stone supplier when things go wrong. But, even if the supplier put up his hand and accepts that the stone is not up to the job (this does not happen very often in my experience) what then? It is not just s simple case of replacing the damaged ones – what do you replace them with?  More of the same?  If you have to replace them, even the entire floor to start again, it is not like lifting a carpet. Very often by the time problems manifest themselves, there is now a fitted kitchen over the floor, maybe there is under floor heating – replacing the tiles is usually a much greater job than it was fitting them in the first place, first you have to remove them (a big job in itself) and you have to do this without damaging anything else. Who pays for all the work? – You might argue the supplier sold you inappropriate material and go after them – well good luck, at best it will involve a long a protracted legal case.

So, my advice to avoid this type of nightmare, is to buy better in the first place. Although it is easy to blame the supplier in most cases (as they are the specialists and should know etc) I think that we as consumers have to take a bit of the responsibility our demand for cheaper and cheaper prices in some ways forces, (certainly encourages) suppliers to look for cheaper material, and the exporters are delighted to be getting some value for material that they previously had to skip or just stock pile as waste. So when buying stone, treat is as a serious investment. Make sure you shop around, not just for price, but also ask the suppliers questions, try to get a feel for their level of expertise (you would be surprised how many people selling stone don’t have the faintest idea about what it is they are selling). Ask what grade they are offering you then ask them to explain what the grades (from that particular quarry) actually mean – this usually sorts the experts from those without a clue. Ask if they have a portfolio of jobs done using the material, will they give you the name of satisfied customers etc. Also, look at it, look at the samples they show you, if they are full of holes (travertine) or they seem weak and friable – ask for a reassurance that they are suitable for your intended purpose. If you can ask to see the stock, how have they come from the quarry? – are the neatly stacked indoors out of the elements or are they in a loose, ramshackle pile out in the yard? Ok, a lot of perfectly good stone is stored outside with no issues, I am just trying to give you some visual clues as to the type of people you are buying from, as it can indicate whether they are the type who care about their products (and their customers) or not. If you have any doubts, or the stone seems significantly cheaper than other vendors, you should at least be asking questions.

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