NATURAL STONE & MARBLE

We now offer marble polishing Little Rock! At Surface Renew we are committed to making your natural stone surface look its absolute best… and stay looking great with minimal fuss on your part! Natural stone has been used for 1000s of years as a flooring surface because of the stunning appearance and durability of these stones whether it be marble, travertine, terrazzo, or granite. Many countertops are now made of these materials and we can restore, repair, and maintain these for you as well!

Services Overview

There are 3 main groups of service offerings for your natural stone floors and countertops:

1.Maintenance: As the name implies, this is an on-going, regularly scheduled service meant to provide a deep clean and restore shine without using the more expensive diamond restoration process we’ll talk about below. Regular maintenance is critical for your surfaces to not only keep them looking great, but also protect your marble polishing Little Rock and/or quickly address minor damage before it becomes an expensive repair in the future!

2. Repair: This is typically done as part of either regular maintenance or a complete restoration, but some circumstances may warrant repair work as a stand-alone service. Give us a call and we’d be happy to talk about what is best for your unique situation. Repair services include reducing or removing “lippage,” and filling cavities, holes, or chips in the stone. Typically, a powder polish is performed as well to bring a nice shine or honed finish back to your surface.

3. Restoration: This is the most in-depth and most costly of our services. A restoration is a deep cleaning process that includes the use of diamond polishing to address scratches, wear patterns, and to get the best, most even shined or honed finish possible. A final step of this process is a good seal and burnish to harden, tighten, and protect your surface. Regular maintenance is critical once a restoration has been done to keep your natural stone looking great! Many times this process is used for surfaces that have unfortunately had wax applied to them as a quick, temporary fix.

What Are Some of the Stones We Clean and Polish?

Travertine
Marble
Limestone
Terrazzo
Granite
Ceramic Tiles and Grout
Nearly Any Natural Stone Surface

So, what exactly is Marble Polishing Little Rock? We’re glad you asked! It is a process of cleaning the stone surface… which in its natural state is usually quite porous and has contaminants deep in the stone if maintenance has not been done. Sometimes, to get more porous stones such as travertine cleaned and free of mold and mildew requires the use of strong acids that should only be used by technicians trained with these substances. The acid literally eats away the mold, soap scum, mildew, and other contaminants that have penetrated the stone surface. A diamond head polisher is then used to remove an extremely thin layer of stone and expose fresh stone. As a final step, we use a powder polish or honing polish to provide the finished look desired as well as “tightening” the surface to make it less porous thru a process known as “crystallization.” Marble polishing Little Rock will better protect your surface from spills and accidents.

Maintenance Tips

Follow these guidelines to prolong the life of your natural stone surface and to maximize its beauty:

Dust mop daily: This helps with allergies and well as removing small particles of rock, sand, and other debris that could get ground across the floor and cause scratches. If needed, use a wet mop to clean dirtier areas or spills.

Door Mats: Use mats at each of your entrances to reduce the amount of dirt and debris that it brought onto your surface.

Alkaline and Acid: Use only neutral Ph cleaners on your natural stone! Alkaline and acid cleaners can cause spotting or etching on your nice, shiny natural stone polished floor or countertop. Promptly clean up all food and drink spills.

Annual Maintenance with Surface Renew, Inc.: For great marble polishing Little Rock, get set up on a regular schedule to keep your floors looking great and protect your investment. Most households and smaller businesses can get great results with an annual plan. If you have heavier foot traffic in your home or business, talk to us about setting up a customized plan for marble polishing Little Rock.

Marble Polishing Little Rock AR | How Do I Care for Natural Stone Floors?

Bob:

Hey, it’s Bob and Ryan with surface renew marble polishing Little Rock AR. And today we wanted to run over some of our natural stone restoration services Little Rock AR with you. And talk a little bit about why it is so important stone restoration versus a stone maintenance floor service that we offer to maintain and protect your stone floors. We have a variety of different services that we offer within that. Ryan, you got a, a, just a list of such as some of the most common things we run into.

Ryan:

Yeah. A lot of times customers call us just over typical wear and tear over a year’s time or two years’ time. Typically, we go into a home, every year and clean and seal. If we do that, we don’t have to do total restoration on things unless there’s damage caused by, you know, house parties or whatever. But typically, what we see is, you know, damage wise, the stone has been etched or, high traffic is the two main things. It’s itching and high traffic.

Bob:

So a lot of surface scratching and stuff to the floor, which we define as more of a maintenance type of thing where we can fix minor issues and restoration. Just to kind of define it a little clearer for you is when we have to get into extensive repairs on the floor.

Ryan:

It’s minor. When you only have a few scratches it is extensive when the whole floor looks like you’ve had a cat box turn. Yeah.

Bob:

Yeah. So kind that, that’s two terms. You’ll hear us talk about if we, discuss your natural stone maintenance with you is kind of how in depth we have to go on it. And those are kind of the two criteria and they’re really cut and dry, but essentially, you know, if we have to get a bigger machine out to do extensive damage, like Ryan was saying, that’s going to be considered a restoration. It’s more intensive and it’s more expensive. And so what we try to encourage people to do is to have maintenance done on their floors to avoid that expense of restoration that some people don’t. So what happens if somebody just doesn’t raise doesn’t maintain their on natural stone floor? Uh

Ryan:

It can go so far as you have to replace it. I mean, we have, we have come out to marble polishing Little Rock AR jobs where flora is just too far gone or the countertop was just too far gone. You see it mainly in like limestone showers where the stone is just literally ate away from the, from just water. I mean, water, water eats stone itself.

Bob:

I even remember one job we did, where it, the mold was so deep into the stone that we could not get it out. We had literally had ruined a stone shower

Ryan:

About 80% out, but we could not get it all out of the pores of the travertine. It was a real porous travertine stone, but one of the jobs that sticks out in my mind is a job that we did. This is one, it was, this is one that’s relatively easy and not classify stuff is do we have to break out diamonds and powder Polish to restore maintenance is just truly, we come in, we clean it with our cleaning chemicals and then we reseal it, u, sometimes powder Polish, not very often, but if we have to break out diamonds, then you’re, you’re leaning towards the more expensive restoration and diamonds take out the scratches diamonds, take out unlevel floors, diamonds take out really, really, really bad . You just can’t come in and clean and seal to get rid of stains and stuff. A lot of, a lot of customers don’t understand that they think you should just feel clean something off the surface for marble polishing Little Rock AR, and it’s not on the surface. It’s actually in the stone. So we have to take a fine layer of the stone off to get past it on a lot of things, it’s simple on countertops, coverings, stains, some stains are too deep. Sometimes it requires a use of a poultice to draw the stain out. And that’s a 24 to 48 hour process to allow the poultice to actually do its work,

Bob:

Which we had to do quite a bit of on the Capitol building restoration, as I remember

Ryan:

State Capitol. And then also the, the big golf course out here, lotion, they had some serious use rust in there. Steam showers that we had to put a rust remover poultice on, and it drew the rust out of the stone, which all, and it’s mainly white Carrera marble actually has iron in it and all the stone has iron in it. So letting it be exposed to a lot of moisture and water will actually cause almost any stone in your home to actually rust and people don’t understand.

Bob:

And so really that that’s one thing we kind of glossed over, but one very important thing to consider in your stone maintenance is your shower. That sounds shower to become so popular, but they are not a maintenance free solution. So how often do you think people should have us in to do a good deep cleaning, repair the grout in the in their shower and just put a good penetrating sealer on there.

Ryan:

Twice a year on the master shower, master shower, when it’s used everyday by typically every household has most households have two people using the master shower. If you use it every day with the hard water and the S in the soaps and stuff that you use twice a year, you have to clean and seal that shower. Most people only do it once a year, and then they get upset whenever they get a restoration bill

 

Marble Polishing Little Rock AR | What Kind of Surfaces?

Bob:

What are the most typical stones that we see out there that require maintenance on a shower?

Ryan:

For marble polishing Little Rock AR, Limestone, travertine, and then just various marbles white Carrera being one of the major ones. And then there’s a Calcutta. It’s like a tan color that looks a little bit like travertine. It gets mistaken for travertine a lot. Limestone, travertine, Calcutta, and there’s, there’s actually, the worst one we’ve seen that you can put in a shower, a slate. That’s one that we’ve done cleaning and sealing on, and there’s just not a lot you can do about it. It, I’ve seen someone get so mad at their shower that was slate. They put a concrete sealer on it and ruined it is in [inaudible] actually.

Bob:

So if you do have a stone in your home, it’d be a great idea to call us and have one of our guys come out, take a look at and recommend to you, what kind of maintenance, you should do on your natural stone surface. Because as Ryan mentioned early on the, the answer of not doing any maintenance is going to lead to the big problem of replacement and stone is beautiful and gorgeous, but it is not cheap

Ryan:

Put in. We just I hated to do it. And one of our biggest customers, his son is selling his house and he had a limestone shower that he did not do any maintenance to for almost 20, 15, 20 years. And I had to break them the bad news that he had a bust busted shower up. It was so ate up.

Bob:

And I, you said something about somebody putting a sealer on themselves with marble polishing Little Rock AR. What are the kinds of problems with people just go ahead and doing their own maintenance?

Ryan:

Yep. The biggest problem is YouTube for marble polishing Little Rock AR. YouTube shows you; you can sand your stone and yes, a professional can use a sandpaper. We do not recommend it. It can be done, but you have to know what you’re doing. But you don’t have access to diamonds and the proper chemicals and stuff to, to Polish your stone correctly. And it takes a trained eye and a train hand to do it. It’s not something you just, Oh, I’m just going to Polish my stone

Bob:

Because isn’t there just a, I mean, for a guy that’s done it a while. There is a difference in the hardness of different stones as well that you need to be aware of when you’re out there.

Ryan:

And there’s specific diamonds for, for, for different stones. There’s harder diamonds or softer diamonds. There’s different cleaners, there’s different sealers. Some stones you have to crystallize, you can’t even Polish them. You have to, it’s a crystallization process, which is, it would take more time. We had to discuss that, but it’s, there’s a whole lot of different knowledge on stone that you have to have. Okay.

Bob:

So if we were to like tell somebody when we’re out visiting, why, why should they use us as their stone restoration and maintenance specialist?

Ryan:

Well, besides having 16 years or over actually over 16 years of our main guys have over 16 years of experience in marble polishing Little Rock AR, it’s just the advanced knowledge we have and the continuing education we do on all the new stones and the new chemicals. And we don’t use the same process we use 16 years ago, you know, we’ve, we go up to date on newer processes and we try newer processes that frankly don’t work. So we do go back to some of the older ones, but we stay educated. We stay on top of stuff. We don’t allow time to pass us by when it comes to our processes. Yeah,

Bob:

I got to say, I think that’s one of the things that separate us is we are a company that’s committed to being on the cutting edge and not just in the stone. I mean, across the board for our business. And not that we, use your house as an experiment lab either. I mean, we test and make sure that, all our processes and any new products are working and are time-tested before we bring them into your house, but we are constantly looking for the newest and best or better solution than we have right now. And I think that’s one thing that sets us apart is that we offer some of the best service out there and definitely have the best process out there for taking care of your natural stone restoration and maintenance.

Ryan:

And we have guys with over 40 years experience in marble polishing Little Rock AR that we talk to on a weekly basis that we either purchase stuff through, or that we just get out of. We bounce ideas off of, and it’s just having that network of knowledge is just super, super important that not everybody has it.

Bob:

And, and equipment-wise to mean we invest in the, you know, what we consider to be the best most reliable equipment out there. Cause it’s very important when you’re talking about something like removing LePage from stone, that your machine cuts that stone very level, or you have dips and just inconsistencies in the stone finish if you don’t

Ryan:

The size of the weight of the machine for the marble polishing Little Rock AR matters too, because you’ll end up breaking the stone with too light of a machine it’ll bounce around and just chip it up.

Bob:

We’re pretty much out of time for today, but we’d like to talk some more about really what causes some of this damage to the stone. We got into it a little bit, but I think that’s a topic almost for itself on another day. So we will cover that in a future podcast.