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Bob:
Hello, it’s Bob and Ryan with surface renew. And today we’d like to talk about travertine cleaning Little Rock AR in your home. And some of the unique challenges that this beautiful stone has and keeping it looking good, Ryan didn’t we just finished recently a job in a customer’s home that you were talking about that had quite a bit of travertine and some that hadn’t been maintained for a while.

Ryan:
Yeah, we sure did. We went into a home that was roughly a little over 6,000 square feet and it had a original travertine floor that was put in in the early nineties, mid 1990s. And it was started off as a honed finish and it had never been cleaned, sealed never taken care of the, the original homeowner lived there for almost 20 years and never maintained it at all.

Bob:
That tells you though how durable real stone finishing is and why it’s such a great investment for travertine cleaning Little Rock AR. But we also showed the current homeowners why it’s so important to maintain, because why spend all that money on some gorgeous travertine, just to have it look beaten up and in awful when you can have it, actually in that case, took it from yesterday, a honed finish to a really shiny finish isn’t that correct?

Ryan:
Homeowner want her to have, she called us to make sure that we could actually Polish it and get it to a high shine. They did not care for the look of adult stone and it’s just taste of whether you want it to be a honed finish or a shiny polished finish. And they want it to be on the Polish side. Cause they think that shiny is clean. Like a lot of people do today.

Bob:
Yep. And that’s the great thing too, for us, our stone experts that work in travertine cleaning Little Rock AR, limestone to Razo granite, just for a few examples, they can actually modify their finishing techniques to give you that matte finish. Like Ryan was saying some people like, or a high glossy finish that some people liked because like Ryan said to a lot of people shiny means clean. You know, there’s one other thing about travertine that I don’t think people are aware of. And that’s basically that it’s essentially like a Swiss cheese when you get it. Isn’t that? Yeah.

Ryan:
It looks like a giant sponge. If you will. It’s got, it’s just naturally naturally full of holes and canned cavities.

Bob:
Yeah. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. Travertine. If you ever look at travertine cleaning Little Rock AR, a really good travertine job is going to have this, I would call it almost a spots on it where it’s like really, really close in color, but clearly not exact because stone natural stone varies so much in shades as you move across the stone. And what do they use to fill those gaps in and kind of get us that look where it’s not spotted, but it’s almost like you can tell it’s been filled

Ryan:
A couple of different products you can use. A lot of people like to use after it’s already installed that I have to come in and color matching a proxy into it, a ninth grade the correct stuff you’re supposed to use and what we use at surface, you’re new when you’re doing travertine, polishing is traveler fill and it matches the stone and the smoothness and a, whether you own it or Polish, it, it looks just like the natural stone instead of a proxy filler.

Bob:
When it comes to travertine polishing and travertine cleaning Little Rock AR what do we tell our customers in terms of like say in a normal home, what is our normal maintenance recommendations that to keep that floor looking good and prevent dirt and debris from penetrating down into that stone and causing damage after.

Ryan:
We’ve restored a travertine polished floor, we recommend the one-year maintenance. And if it’s been restored by us, or if it’s just been maintained by us, it needs to be cleaned and sealed once a year in high traffic areas, not necessarily the whole floor, but your high traffic areas definitely need it. Okay.

Why Get Travertine Cleaning Little Rock AR?

Bob:
And again, travertine is just a gorgeous stone and a great stone after your home. If you’re trying to make a statement but again, like we said, it needs maintenance and we can’t emphasize how important it is to have regular maintenance done and travertine cleaning Little Rock AR, have it done by a technician or a trained person that understands the subtle differences in the hardness and softness of different stones and how to make sure that that travertine is probably properly filled in sealed. So that dirt debris, water, Coke, spills, don’t penetrate the stone and cause permanent damage to the stone because oftentimes it’s very difficult if not impossible, unless you just happen to have some extra tiles to replace a limestone floor with the exact same tile.

Ryan:
Yeah. Cause out of that, out of the floors you have laid in the nineties say 20 years ago the that side of the mountain has already been harvested for that stone. So the travertine this out in the stores today is going to be there really, really light or really, really dark. It’s not going to be the same and you’ll have a checker board look effect. If you just try to replace them with tiles, you find today, unless you’re lucky enough that the builder left you a stack of tiles, which they usually do. But unlike the case of this floor, what we did was we took it from a honed Polish to a powder Polish. We had to do a lot of cleaning and restoring first and we there’s two different routes. You can go, you can crystallize Polish a floor or you can mechanically Polish a floor.

Ryan:
And we chose the mechanically polished the floor because it lasts longer. We came in, cleaned the floor really, really well. They guys did. They ran diamonds on it. They ran two hundreds, 400 grit and 800 grit diamonds. Then they cleaned that really well. Then they put a sealer on it and they PA they did a well, they did a powder Polish before they sealed it. They did the 200, 400, 800, like I said, then they did a powder, a double Potter Polish over it, which brings out the real high shine and the travertine. And then they sealed it.

Bob:
And when we talk about sealing it, our sealer actually is a semi penetrating sealer. So it gets down in there and crystallizes down in the floor and seals up the pores in the floor to make it more difficult for dirt debris spills, get down in the stone and damage it.

Ryan:
Correct. It’s non topical. It’s penetrating, it gets down into the stone and gives a barrier. And it’s got a little microscopic Silicon particles that get down the voids and the stone and fill it in. So when you spill water or any kind of juices like that, it’ll actually beat up kind of like, I hate to say the word wax because wax is the devil to travertine, but it’ll do kind of like a wax type deal and it’ll leave. It’ll let the puddle up to where you can wipe it off without a penetrating.

Bob:
And again, we emphasize too with travertine cleaning Little Rock AR, how important it is to use those kinds of penetrating sealers, as opposed to what we call a sacrificial sealer that sits on top of your stone. And while it does a great job while it’s first applied, the problem with a sacrificial type of sealer is that it has to be constantly reapplied. And then at some point it has to be stripped off because you’ve gotten that sealer so thick and that sealing process, you risk damaging your stone. So we highly recommend, like Ryan said, either our powder Polish, our mechanical sealing process.

Ryan:
Like you said, the sacrificial, it’s a topical coating, like a wax or a polyurethane sealer, which are both terrible for natural stone and travertine cleaning Little Rock AR. I can’t stress how terrible it is, but in the high traffic areas, it just wears off fast kitchen chairs or any chairs sliding around will, will leave scuff marks and even having a big area rug to help with noise reduction and it all stone house, the area rugs will actually leach into the, to the wax and leave an outline where the area rug was. And it’ll it ruined the stone too.

Bob:
Yep. So wax also not a great option. Talked about the polyurethane sealers and the problems with those when you do travertine cleaning Little Rock AR, but, but also even the wax is not a good option simply because it’s, it’s another sacrificial coating, the sacrificial coating. That’s not even as hard as the polyurethane. It is meant to be scuffed and scratched so that it’s not the actual floor that’s doing it. But the problem is in a very short amount of time, your floor is covered with scuffs and scratches when you use wax.

Ryan:
And then you have to use a really harsh stripper. That’s really, really hard on the stone, which itself can stain an edge the stone while you’re trying to get the wax off. So you’re just, you’re fighting a losing battle by doing that instead of having it professionally polished, too sealed.

Bob:
So travertine cleaning Little Rock AR by surface or new is by far your best option to maintain or to restore your homes, your floors in your home business or office. And we can generally come in. And what do you think roughly most floors we can like say on, in an average home, what do we typically charge a range for flooring, say.

Ryan:
Average 2000 square foot home. We can do those for around 2,400 to $3,500. And that includes fixing the grout, cleaning the grout, filling in a little chip holes. Anything like that, that, that will deter from the beauty of your floor. We’ll come in and do all the repairs necessary except for we don’t repair and we don’t replace tiles. But if you do have a really, really bad tile, we do have a tile guy that we recommend to come in and replace it. If you do have matching tiles to replace.

Bob:
And that’s a good point too for travertine cleaning Little Rock AR, that we didn’t really hit on is the fact that our technicians are very detail oriented. It’s the small things that really make a floor look complete, like color matching the grout, repairing those small pit holes, taking care of the scratches and scuffs so that when somebody walks into your house, their initial appearance is nice, clean, shiny floor. So in travertine polishing, we can’t emphasize how important it is to find people that are detail oriented and highly rated on Google, which we are, we are what we’re the highest rated. We are the highest and Mo let’s say the highest rated and most reviewed floor polishing company in Arkansas. And we’re very proud of that. Obviously.

Ryan:
All of our technicians have a minimum of 10 to 15 years of experience before they come to work for us.

Bob:
So when you call surface renew, you’re getting a proven system from a company with a proven track record. And we’re very proud of that.