Stone Care: The Pros Speak Out

Talk to the people most likely to come in and clean up the mess after things have reached a critical stage – stone-care professionals – and they’ll probably say a better exchange of information could avoid some of the everyday issues that make their work difficult.
No one’s free from their criticism, whether it’s architects and designers who specify the wrong stone, fabricators who inadequately seal their products, or installers who ignore that step all together.
Failure to stress the need for a good impregnating sealer isn’t their only peeve with installers, though. Some questionable installation practices, and a general lack of cleanliness at the jobsite can make future maintenance or restoration a little more difficult.
Many give high marks to professional services that provide day-to-day care of commercial and government buildings. However, some of their sharpest remarks are aimed at installers who fail to tell their residential customers about the proper cleaning of these surfaces – or give them incorrect information – resulting in surprised end-users..

UNFORTUNATE MIX
The days when an architect oversaw just about every aspect of a commercial construction project, and home buyers knew their contractor personally, pretty much went the way of dollar-a-minute long-distance rates. The business became much more efficient, but those involved in a project are far removed from the fruits of their mistakes.
A good case in point, say stone-care experts, is that they’re called in to try to fix problems that never should have happened in the first place.
One of their biggest complaints is when architects or designers decide to mix different types of stone – or even stone with wood – to achieve a particular look.
Joseph Lupo of High Definition Marble and Restoration in Holbrook, N.Y., says he frequently runs into jobs where a marble or limestone floor is accented with granite.
“The colors look pretty, but the designers never take into consideration the ramifications that occur when the marble has to be restored,” he says. “You can’t restore marble and granite at the same time because you can’t polish the two the same. Aesthetically it looks good, but it’s a refinishing nightmare that creates a lot of labor and a lot of expense.”
Jim Eldridge of Natural Stone Restoration in Naples, Fla., says his own pet peeve is designers who specify marble for bathrooms. There seems to be some realization that kitchens require a harder stone, such as granite, but concerns about hardness and durability go out the window – especially in residential construction.
“When designers think about a bathroom, they aren’t thinking about perfumes and toothpaste and other chemicals we abuse that room with,” he says. “That’s definitely an area where it’s important to use the right stone.”
Eldridge, at least, is charitable enough to believe that it’s just something these people aren’t learning in school. However, he says it will probably have to be addressed there, since many architects and designers aren’t interested in listening to people in the trades.
And, of course, that doesn’t do anything about the woman who’s simply decided to replace the top of her kitchen island with a piece of marble which she’s buying from the local fabricating shop or showroom.
Tom McNall of Tom’s Maintenance in Huron Park, Ont., acknowledges that it’s good business to recognize that the customer is always right. But, the fabricator or installer also needs to do as much as possible before the job is finished to alert the buyer to potential problems.
“People think they just have to have marble, but they don’t realize it’s too soft and it scratches too easily and stains too easily,” McNall says. “It may look terrible only weeks after it’s installed. Then, they get a bill from someone like me to restore it, and they’re mad at the installer or the fabricating company or the showroom.”

PROFESSIONAL INSTALLATIONS?
Choosing the wrong type of stone for a particular application may be the fault of the architect or homeowner, but myriad other problems stone-care professionals see frequently can be laid squarely at the feet of those doing the installation.
One they say they see fairly frequently is lippage. Don Harari of Royal Care Services in Encino, Calif., says sometimes a floor is so uneven he’s not sure just who installed the job.
“There’s so much difference between the high and low on the stone that dirt accumulates faster in the grout than it should and it’s more difficult to clean,” Harari says. “With marble and limestone, the best is to grind it, and I know people don’t want to do that because of the cost involved.”
His preference for ease of maintenance is a butt joint installation and grout replacement, so the floor looks like it’s in one piece. Harari says he also encounters many floors that are improperly grouted.
“Grout in a residential installation should never be more than one-eighth of an inch, and it should be an unsanded grout,” he says. “Many times I find the grout is wider than that, and with the sanded grout it’s difficult to maintain; if it’s level with the floor and you grind or polish it, you can scratch the surface.”
Natural Stone’s Eldridge says he’s willing to give installers the benefit of the doubt on lippage, especially when they’re working with warped stones. What distresses him is finding a stone floor installed over a temporary substrate.
As an example, he cites a marble floor that’s been put down over a cork sound barrier using latex adhesive.
“Then, we go in and add water,” he explains. “If there’s a crack in the stone or a grout joint opens up and water gets through there, it releases the latex adhesive. Then, we have a problem.”
Harari also has complaints about what is – or rather isn’t – under a permanent installation. He says failure to provide a moisture barrier can lead to long-term problems, especially with marble, where the moisture carries salts into the stone which can cause spalling and pitting, even to the point where the stone can’t be restored.
And, if the installer isn’t careful about evenly applying the adhesive, the resulting air pockets can lead to loose tiles and grout, as well as chipping.
High Definition’s Lupo says he’s encountered situations where the installer doesn’t have the patience to properly pack the joints with grout or epoxy. When one of his crews comes in, the combination of water, vibrating floor machines and the wet/dry vac can lead to empty joints.

CLEAN & PROTECT
Joseph Sembrat of Conservation Solutions in District Heights, Md., does a great deal of restoration work on older buildings, including their exteriors. And, he says those areas aren’t always exempt from such problems.
“Certain joint sealants perform better than others,” he says. “Some sealants deteriorate with UV (ultraviolet) exposure.
“There are also problems associated with others that have good UV stability. Some silicones actually bleed into the stone and cause staining adjacent to the joints, which is a very major problem and very difficult to correct.”
He believes that installers should look at some of the methods used by previous generations for protecting joints, such as lead mushroom caps. His other big gripe: the use of ferrous-based anchors in hanging veneers.
“If a ferrous anchor is used to hang a panel, you’re going to get rust stains bleeding into the face,” Sembrat says. “There’s really nothing that can be done, other than totally disassembling the entire façade.”
While these are the sorts of installation methods that can cause problems well after the stone is in, there are some practices that become problems within days, weeks or months because of cleanliness – or, to be honest, the lack of it.
“We find a lot of projects where installers don’t use grout release in the installation process,” says Scott Krupp of Exclusive Stone Care in Atherton, Calif. “They’re leaving all kinds of grout smear on their finished products. Consequently, the floors may be brand new, but they don’t look it, and the customer has to spend money with us to come in and fix the problem.”
Hal Edmonds of California Stone Care in Sacramento, Calif., agrees that grout haze from traditional grouts can be a problem. He says the other big offender he sees is with epoxy grouts.
“They’re not getting it off before it sets up, and then it’s a real problem,” Edmonds says. “Whether it’s there a couple days or a couple months, there’s no way to get rid of it with solvents. Once it’s hard, you’re not going to get it off without using some mechanical method.”
Although Harari is a strong proponent of having installers cover floors with cardboard or resin paper after the job is in place to protect against the stains, spills and scratches of other construction, he says using masking tape to anchor those covers can be a big mistake.
“If you put masking tape on a limestone floor for any period of time, it will leave marks,” he says. “The adhesive just penetrates the stone and you have to hone the floor to remove them.”

SEALING AND BEYOND
If there’s one thing stone-care professionals seem to agree on to make their work easier, it’s the necessity of finishing any installation job with a good impregnating sealer. However, they say that doesn’t always happen, or it’s not always done well.
Sometimes the problem starts with the fabricator, says Natural Stone’s Eldridge. While many are using an impregnating sealer on items such as countertops, others are not.
“Some just aren’t doing it, and others are using something that works off in a couple days, leaving the buyer with exposed stone,” he says.
Of course with walls and floors, it’s an entirely different situation, and customers are sometimes unaware of the need to seal.
“Several times I’ve gone on jobs where the stone wasn’t sealed,” says Tom’s Maintenance’s McNall. “To me, it’s like putting ScotchGard™ on marble, but it’s not always done. About 60 percent of it may be the cost. Another factor in why it’s not done is installers’ unfamiliarity with the product and how to apply it.”
Unfortunately, not using the right sealer or applying it incorrectly can produce some real stone-care horror stories. Royal Care’s Harari tells of one recent instance where he was called in after a general contractor decided to apply a surface sealer to bring up the sheen on a crosscut travertine floor he’d installed in his own home.
“At that point, it was streaky and it was awful,” Harari says. “We had to scrape it and polish it, and I prepared an example for him of the way to polish it naturally. However, he had to pay for his mistake.”
People such as Exclusive’s Krupp and California Stone’s Edmonds acknowledge that many installers are aware of the importance of sealing their work using good products. However, they say because of the schedules on which jobs are done, they may not have the time or inclination to see that it’s done.
“A lot of times the installers are very busy,” says Krupp. “They like to get into a building and get out. They just set the tiles and go on to the next job. A lot of times in production housing the buyer never has any contact with the people doing the construction”
Edmonds adds that many installers may not want to take the time for the floor to cure, clean it and then seal it, or cover it and go back and complete the cleaning and sealing after the rest of the work is completed – especially if they haven’t included the work in the contract.
“A lot of installers don’t want to bother with sealing for a number of reasons,” Edmonds says. “It does take a certain amount of skill to prepare it and seal it properly. Unless they know what they’re doing and clean it properly and apply the right kind of sealer and know how to buff it off, it doesn’t necessarily come out looking very good.”
Most stone-care professionals say their companies offer an easy alternative for the installer who knows the importance of finishing a job by cleaning it and sealing it, but doesn’t have the time, inclination or skill to do that part of the work.
“Either contacting someone like me, or putting the client in touch with some like me, is a better alternative than saying that the job doesn’t need to be done because you don’t want to do it,” says Natural Stone’s Eldridge. “That way you can say,  ‘This needs to be done,’ and it takes some of the onus off the installer by telling the customer it’s not included in the bid.”
In much the same way, they say referring a customer – particularly a residential one – to a stone-care professional at the start can also ensure that new installation is maintained properly. While situations certainly exist in which the customer never talks to the installer about day-to-day care, what’s less-understandable is installers are giving out incomplete or incorrect information.
“Don’t just tell them to use water and say, ‘That’s it,’” says Harari. “Often we’re not called until three or four years after the installation, when the housekeeper has been using a window cleaner or another chemical that’s etched the surface.”
McNall believes that often times buyers are under the mistaken impression that rather than being low-maintenance, because it’s a natural product, stone should require virtually no maintenance. Among his pet peeves are people who use something other than a dustmop for sweeping their floors, and including vinegar in their cleaning processes, rather than a mild detergent or stone soap.
“They also need to know that if they don’t have a water softener and hard water, they’re likely to need someone like me on a more-frequent basis,” he says. “There I’m talking about having calcium build-up on areas such as granite shower stalls.”

EDUCATE AT HOME
McNall and Eldridge say educating homeowners or their housekeepers is a big part of what they do. McNall hosts a monthly radio program addressing stone care, and Eldridge estimates as much as 70 percent of his time is devoted to educating people on what they’ve bought.
“That’s both cold calls I get over the phone and services I provide to about 10 of the largest fabricators and installers in my area,” he says. “Probably 90 percent of the calls I go on are strictly maintenance problems.”
And, if an installer doesn’t want to refer the customer to a stone-care professional, McNall suggests at a minimum providing the person with a copy of the Marble Institute of America’s brochure on stone care.
Although they say their residential customers – or their housekeepers – need to be instructed on proper stone care, many of these professionals have high praise for the crews that keep commercial buildings looking sharp.
They say they’re generally well-versed on what they should be doing for daily maintenance, and they understand that the professionals need to be called in periodically to restore stone surfaces. However, not everything is perfect.
Conservation Solutions’ Sembrat, for example, is certain that some maintenance people may not be aware of what they’re doing when they use chemical de-icers next to buildings.
“What’s happening is the salts are migrating into the stone and swelling and bursting it and the attachments that hold it together apart,” he says. “I don’t blame the person who’s been told to solve a problem, and he or she probably doesn’t know the salt is going to cause the stone to fail.”
And, there are also some people who won’t change their ways, despite well-meant advice. McNall cites one hotel where he’s called in yearly to restore the marble floors in the bathrooms.
“I suggested to the hotel manager that if they’d put a mat under the urinals they’d have no problem with etching,” he says. “The manager said, ‘But, then it doesn’t look like marble.’ That’s okay with me; I wasn’t offended. I just keep going back year after year.”
McNall notes that the companies manufacturing cleaning products are often willing to work with companies such as his in arranging stone care seminars for larger customers. And, California Stone Care’s Edmonds observes that the right maintenance program can even translate into financial savings for some of these real estate management firms.
“A couple years ago we cleaned 60,000 square feet of terrazzo that had a quarter-inch of acrylic sealer on it and looked terrible,” he says. “It cost a cost a lot of money to have that stripped off. I could have shown them models that show over time it’s less expensive to maintain it naturally with just polishing and honing the traffic areas periodically.”
In that case, it definitely would’ve been an advantage to the contractor to have a higher level of knowledge to begin with. But, as Conservation Solutions’ Sembrat notes, “Everybody can always use more education.”