I was contacted by the owner of a cleaning company in Milton Keynes, after an end of tenancy clean at a house in Sharnbrook went wrong. Unfortunately a member of their staff had incorrectly applied an acid based cleaning product to the Marble shower tiles which like most natural stone is acid sensitive. The cleaning product had etched the stone causing the damage you can see below. Being a reputable company they were determined to put the situation right and we were asked to step in.

We have had a few issues of this type before where customers keen to remove unsightly Limescale marks from their stone tiles use a household cleaner without reading the bottle label first to see if it’s safe to use. Issues of this nature on Marble cannot be easily resolved with chemical products; it takes specialist knowledge and equipment.

The quote was given and accepted and the work was booked in with the letting company for a few weeks later.

Cleaning and Polishing a Marble Shower Cubicle

The first photos show the extent of the damage which had not only damaged the immediate area but as the cleaning product was in liquid form it had ran down the wall had totally ruined the surface of the tiles in the lower half of the shower.

The first thing I did was to protect the shower tray with towels and then began assembling the equipment needed for this job which consisted of a wet polisher, a variable speed polisher, one set of 6” Tile Doctor burnishing pads from 100 grit to 3,000 grit and one full set of diamond blocks from 80 grit upwards.

I then went about testing how far down the scale I would have to go to get the best results. I found that in most areas the application of a 200 grit burnishing pad was adequate to resurface the tile and remove damage but in some areas I had to go down the scale as low as 80 grit to achieve the desired result.

One the damage had been removed the higher grit pads are used in sequence to restore the polish finishing with the 3,000 grit pad. No chemicals are used in this process, just water and the small six inch diamond encrusted burnishing pads which fit to a hand buffer.

Although only a small area, no more than 4 m2 this job took most of the day. However, as the whole shower room was tiled in the same tiles it was a much more cost effective to restore the damaged tiles than replace them.

We were able to achieve an excellent result which the client was very happy with, no doubt saving the cleaning company thousands of pounds in replacement costs.