As the flooring industry — like the jan/san industry — gets back on its feet after three rough economic years, those feet might be standing on natural stone floors: marble, granite, terrazzo, limestone or travertine. Natural stone continues to be a common choice in building design specifications.

Compelling evidence exists for the future prevalence of natural floor surfaces: a recent report says that a total of $3.3 billion worth of stone was consumed in the United States in 2002, up from $2.2 billion in 1998 — a 50 percent increase, according to a joint report by Catalina Research Inc., and Ceramic Tile and Stone Consultants.

With natural stone surfaces becoming increasingly popular flooring choices, the need for properly trained people to care for these unique surfaces becomes imperative. Natural floors require specific cleaning and maintenance processes and products to retain their original beauty. The sad fact, however, is there exists a huge knowledge gap in how to care for these floors — and both distributors and end users are guilty of less-than-satisfactory skill levels.

Clayton Baldwin, an outside sales representative for Brady Industries, Las Vegas, is not one of the guilty ones. His company is committed to keeping current on stone care so that he can help customers keep their facilities in tip-top condition. Baldwin has ample exposure to natural surfaces, in part because of the company’s Las Vegas location — many hotels and casinos are wall-to-wall marble, stone and granite to enhance their extravagance and beauty.

“Over the years, floor surfaces have changed. It used to be carpet everywhere until 13 to 15 years ago when the natural stone became more popular for glamorous appearances,” Baldwin explains. “We used to teach people to treat them like other surfaces, but we quickly learned that that’s not the way to care for it. It needs to be treated differently.”

Diamond In the Rough
Natural floors require different chemicals and cleaning processes than synthetic floors. The more traditional coating-and-stripping process is still perfect for vinyl composition tile and other manmade surfaces, but most natural stone surfaces call for a different maintenance routine suited to their unique properties.

Diamond honing is a popular restorative method for correcting stone floors’ “blemishes,” and maintaining that like-new shine building managers expect. Using a floor machine equipped with a diamond abrasive disk, and plain old water, diamond honing grinds away imperfections in the floor’s surface. Starting with coarse-grit diamond pads, end users work their way through a succession of increasingly finer-grit pads. Done well, stone floors will regain their luster and shine, without the need for stripping and recoating.

Glenn Rothstein has successfully instituted the diamond-honing method for stone care maintenance in area school districts for the past 10 years. Schools are a huge market for Bio-Shine Inc., Rothstein’s Spotswood, N.J. distributorship — 40 percent — and he spends much of his time helping school customers maintain their floors, which are often terrazzo.

Diamond honing can be an effective maintenance method for terrazzo floors, says Rothstein, president of the company, but users need to be taught how to do it correctly.

For one, many people have difficulty telling the difference between an epoxy and a concrete-matrix terrazzo floor. Epoxy, a lower-quality material, does not respond well to diamond honing, and Rothstein often recommends stripping, then coating with floor finishes instead.

Many school custodians have the strip-and-coat mentality so firmly rooted in their minds that the main challenge becomes winning them over to diamond honing with demonstrations and how-to education.

“Most of them don’t understand the newer, more natural processes. They have been preaching all these years to strip and coat a floor, and that’s generally what these people have been doing.”

Diamond honing is not the only maintenance method common for stone floors. Other methods can supplement or replace diamond honing. Polishing and scrubbing with acid-based floor chemicals is common to gently remove fine scratches and bring the polish back. Stone conditioners can be used to keep stone from drying out and eventually cracking.

Crystallization, as well as acidic or non-acidic powder polishing are other popular stone maintenance methods.

Common Mistakes
Using any of these cleaning processes improperly can produce unexpected results. Although most big mess-ups are correctable with proper equipment and care, end users who aren’t aware of that fact might be horrified when they realize the chemical they just used etched its way through the stone’s surface. On top of that there is the added cost of correcting the problem.

Tony Maida, general manager of National Paper and Sanitary Supply, can relate. He recalls a time he was called to a customer location after the facility’s cleaning staff used an acidic cleaner that ate into the building’s two-month-old Italian marble floors.

Maida, whose company has branches in Omaha, Neb., and Des Moines, Iowa, helped the customer use grinding diamonds to restore the floor, much to the customer’s relief. Still, it was a time-consuming, costly mistake.

“One of the nice things with stone floors is that you can really fix the mistakes without replacing the floor,” Maida says.

Baldwin agrees that stone is sensitive; many chemicals intended for cleaning other surfaces can react with the calcium in stone, causing pitting. Inadvertently splashing chemicals — those used to clean porcelain in hotel restrooms, for instance — can damage stone surfaces as well.

One of the most common challenges distributors face in educating customers is overcoming end-user misconceptions about stone. Cleaners often ignore stone floors, either because they think they don’t require regular maintenance, or they’re worried they’ll do something incorrectly.

“They think they don’t have to maintain them the way they have other floors until one day they walk in and discover there are traffic lines,” says Baldwin.

So Baldwin’s first task in helping customers deal with stone floors is making them feel comfortable with them by providing hands-on training and a little reassurance.

When they are able to maintain the floors correctly, they see a big difference in its appearance, Baldwin says. That allows them to take ownership and pride in their work.

High Hopes, Low Budgets
When updating a facility’s look, architects, building owners and managers — anyone specifying building materials — are eager to install natural surface floors, but often, they don’t realize that maintenance budgets will need to grow accordingly.

“They’ll take resilient [flooring], pull it out and put in marble, then they won’t have the budget or the manpower to maintain the marble,” says Baldwin. This leaves cleaning staffs in a jam.

The challenge then is to convince purchasers that a certain amount of maintenance is required, and that if they choose a maintenance regimen wisely, they’ll save money down the road. Diamond honing, for example, requires an initial investment — machine and diamond pads — but eventually pays for itself when you consider the floor chemicals, strippers and finishes traditional flooring requires.

“In the long run, diamond honing is significantly cheaper,” says Rothstein.

Maida agrees: “There are some upfront costs you have to take into consideration, but once you put those costs into a three to five-year process, looking at it from a maintenance standpoint, you see the payback pretty quickly.”

Of course, any floor’s appearance relies on the basics: an ambitious mopping routine and entrance matting systems. Methodically removing dirt from floors — where constant traffic grinds it into the surface — will go a long way toward floors maintaining their glistening, upscale appearance.




POSTED ON: 4/1/2004