Home-Wizard.com Guide to Marble Flooring Care including free automatic reminders

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Interactive Home Maintenance Guide

To maintain the appearance and useful life of your marble flooring, it is important that your home maintenance program include the proper maintenance for your marble floors.

Marble is a very hard, but porous surface. Spills should be cleaned up immediately to keep stains from seeping into the surface pores of the marble flooring. See also: Wood Floors and Carpet & Rugs.

Shown below are the recommended routine maintenance tasks for your marble floors.

Learn to enjoy managing your home with our free Newsletter or our free Automatic Maintenance Reminders. We can also show you the Recommended Maintenance Schedules for your entire home.


		Maintenance Task: Annual floor treatment

		How do you do a treatment of a marble floor?
		A treatment of marble flooring include 4 steps: Cleaning: Wet the surface thoroughly, then scrub with a mild, nonabrasive detergent using a clean fiber brush. Rinse by flooding with plenty of clean, hot water, then repeat washing if necessary. The final rinse should remove all traces of detergent. To prevent streaking, wipe dry with a clean, lint free cloth. Remove stains: Stains that do not come out with simple washing should be treated according to the type of stain: organic stains, rust stains, or oil stains. Consult your local flooring professional for the type of cleaner and stain removal procedure for your particular floor and stain situation. Polish rough spots: If an area feels rough because of small scratches or other imperfections, it should be sanded smooth with extra-fine #400A wet-or-dry sandpaper. After the surface feels smooth, wipe clean then apply water and tin oxide powder by rubbing briskly over the spot until it shines. Wipe off immediately afterwards with a clean damp cloth. Repeat if necessary. Wax: Apply a top quality paste wax. Buff to a high shine using a lamb's wool applicator or soft cloth.

		Why is it important to do a treatment of a marble floor?
		Renews the appearance of your marble floors.

		How often should you do a treatment of a marble floor?
		Perform annually (March).

		How does Home-Wizard rate the costs and benefits for this task?
		The cost of this task is moderately high, in that it is a fairly time consuming process to do correctly. You may want to consider hiring a professional for this task.

		The benefits of this task are the renewed appearance of your expensive marble flooring.

		Overall Home-Wizard benefit-versus-cost rating (one 'hat' = low and four 'hats' = high):

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS from "Ask-the-Wizard":

QUESTION from Corrine B Hinkle - randchinkle on 2/12/2008:

We have had tile floors installed. The grout has been sealed twice at installation. Still, the (lght-colored) grout gets dirty and I cannot get it clean. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance for your consideration

ANSWER FROM HOME-WIZARD.COM ON 2/12/2008:

Dear randchinkle:

Here is a webpage that gives a good description of how to clean tile grout:

http://www.mrscleannw.com/tips/grout-cleaning.html

Which describes the best way to clean grout (i.e., using a mixture they describe of baking soda, vinegar, ammonia and water, and then using a wet/dry vacuum to pull the dirt out of the porous grout after applying a cleaning solution).

If this still doesn’t work for you, then it may be possible that your grout has become stained (especially since you say it is light colored). If it has indeed gotten stained, then you have a couple of options: 1) you can use a tool called a "grout saw" to gently remove the top layer of grout, then re-grout your tile with clean grout; or 2) tile stores sell special grout stains that permanently color the grout and hide the stains.

Hope this is helpful
Home-Wizard.com
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