Picking the right company to do your Marble Floors Restoration can be a challenging task. In many cases, customers privilege price over quality, and the results can be catastrophic. A company or individual with no or little experience can really spoil your Marble surfaces in a way that the economy into hiring a less than qualified professional can turn in a huge loss that will force you to spend sometimes ten times more to fix the problem.

So, what should you look for when hiring a professional to restore your marble surfaces? We give you 6 things to look for when hiring a company or professional to deal with your precious marble areas.

Everyone wants to have that perfect shiny floor that will awe their house guests. But, it can be really hard to maintain the precious marble and the other natural stone that can be damaged easily. If proper care is not taken, the natural stone can become damaged, and will ultimately lose its shine. So, the best thing that you can do in such a situation is to hire a professional marble and stone restoration company to do periodic maintenance and servicing of the stones in your house. This way the marbles will not only be shiny and beautiful but will also last longer.

Topical coating is an application of natural or synthetic waxes, acrylics, urethanes and epoxies over the marble floor. The majority used today are composed of acrylics. Such applications usually call “maintenance of marble surfaces”.

In actuality, topical coating is simply replacing the polished marble floor with a film of reflective and shiny plastic polymers, which are designed to wear and be refinished over time. In reality, this is a system of maintaining the plastic, not the stone. It is a finish designed to gradually wear under traffic or what is referred to in the industry as a “sacrificial coating”. The plastic finishes many times contain chemicals that further damage the stone. The strippers and harsh pads used periodically to reduce the finishes and replace the glossy surface also do mechanical damage to the underlying stone.

Marble is a metamorphic rock resulting from the metamorphism of limestone. Metamorphism can be defined as the solid state recrystallization of pre-existing rocks due to changes in heat and/or pressure and/or introduction of fluids. This metamorphic process causes a complete recrystallization of the original rock into an interlocking mosaic of calcite and/or dolomite crystals.

What does this mean to the marble floor owner? Marble is one of the softest stone flooring products on today’s market, however it is one of the most popular choices due to its natural beauty. Marble is highly porous. So it is very easily etched by acids such as orange juice, tomato juice, and vinegar.

The deep shine we see on polished stone is achieved by rubbing the stone with a series of abrasive materials. The process is very similar to sanding a piece of wood. The stone is rubbed with a coarse abrasive grit, followed by finer and finer grits until the stone becomes smooth. The scratches left behind from one grit are removed by the next, creating finer and finer scratches. The process continues until the scratches are microscopic. The shine on the stone is achieved by abrading the surface to the point at which it becomes extremely smooth and starts to develop some reflectivity. The shine on the stone is thus a product of optics. This same optical property can be observed on a pond. When the wind is blowing and the surface of the pond is wavy, it becomes difficult to see a reflection; when the air is still and the pond is calm, a deep reflection can be observed. So in order to achieve a deep shine on your stone all that really needs to be done is to smooth it until it shines.