Case History No

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Don’t Lose your Marbles!

The Natural Stone Corner

By Maurizio Bertoli

Case History No. 23

“Hello, is this the marble cleaning company?”

“Yes it is.”

“I have a brand new marble bathroom, and my cleaning lady cleaned it with a bathroom cleaner and now I have water stains all over the marble and they won’t come out…”

“Mmm … how come you have water stains if your cleaning lady used a bathroom cleaner, which is no water?!”

“Well ... I don’t know…they look like water stains to me …”

I already knew what it was all about, but I didn’t want to spend too much time on the phone giving my prospective customer a crush course in chemistry applied to minerals. I made an appointment and a few days later I was there. This mansion was just unbelievable! The bathroom – all 750 square feet of it (floor only!) – was a piece of work: double-sided fireplace in the middle of the room, his and hers vanity top, his and hers restroom, 12-foot high walls, football-size shower stall … the works! Everything but the ceiling was lined with 12”x12” Chinese Mystique marble tiles. The two vanity tops were Italian Luna Pearl granite. Every single marble tile was badly etched. And here comes the story: All that stone had been installed a month or so before by the same retail outfit that sold it to the lady. Needless to say, she had asked the dealer what to use to take care of all that marble, and the answer was: “Oh, you don’t have to worry about a thing: we’re going to seal your marble!” Some answer, huh! It’s like saying that since it’s sealed one doesn’t have to clean it anymore! They charged the lady an extra $1,800.00 for the “sealing job”. A couple of weeks later, one morning, when the sunlight was hitting a wall in a certain angle, the homeowner noticed that the marble surface was kind of “cloudy” all over. (It could have been a residue of grout film, or a residue of the impregnator/sealer that had been applied. Ed.) She called the dealer to report the situation and the alleged answer from them was that they were not in the cleaning business. “Have your cleaning service do their job!” “Well, OK, what should they use?” “Why, it’s a bathroom, isn’t it … use a bathroom cleaner!” She reportedly was told. (It’s a good thing that it was a bathroom. Had it been, say, a family room, it would have been kinda tough finding a ‘family room cleaner’! Ed.) The lady went out and bought a so called “bathroom cleaner” (“Lysol” she told me) and handed it over to her cleaning lady. The poor soul took a ladder and, starting from the upper corner of one wall, scrupulously cleaned every single tile! When the whole thing dried up it was a war zone!

I spent a few minutes explaining to the lady that: A) Applying an impregnator/sealer to polished marble is a pretty useless practice to begin with. B) Applying an impregnator/sealer on walls is plain idiotic, since nobody will ever spill anything on a wall. C) Bottom line, her marble needed a sealing job like she needed a hole in her head! D) Her “water stains” were nothing but the marks of corrosion (etch marks) produced by the bathroom cleaner she had used. Since they were actual surface damages (not stains), the impregnator/sealer had no business preventing them.

For some reason, the lady was kind of upset with her cleaning lady, because she should’ve known better that such type of products were not safe on marble! … To which I asked: “Excuse me, perhaps you’re right, maybe your cleaning lady should have known better; but let me ask you a question: does she tool around town on a big Jaguar?” “Why, no …” Answered she. “Well, the ‘knowledgeable’ guy who sold you on a sealing job that you didn’t need and, in addition to that, told you to use a bathroom cleaner – which is a marble killer – to do yourself what they should have done in the first place, does drive a big Jag!” (I did know that dealer well. Ed.)

I quoted the lady $9,500 to “clean” her marble. It was April 17, 1993. Never heard from her since!

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