Stone floors are extremely popular, and they have been for many years. The vast range of colors and shades, the durability, practicality and relative ease of maintenance, plus their abundance in nature has made them a perennial choice of flooring material down the centuries. But they are not indestructible, they are easy to look after and maintain but there are some pitfalls to avoid. Below are the most common mistakes people make when caring for their floors.

1. Lack of Dust Mats

The number 1 enemy of all floors, not just stone, is grit. Every flooring material will wear, it is just a matter of time. If I were to take two diamonds (the hardest known natural material) and rub them against each other, guess what, they will both wear. Every-day grit, carried in on shoes can contain all kinds of minerals such as quartz. Walking this onto your floor will quickly dull and scratch its surface. The answer is to eliminate grit, any way you can and one of the best ways is to put a dust-collecting mat outside the door. If you add another just inside you are giving your floor a much better chance of avoiding harmful grit.

2. Walking on your Stone Floor with Out-Door Shoes

This is related to the first point of course. If you have a fancy polished wood floor, or an expensive carpet, I bet you take your shoes off right? We all tend to instinctively know how to be careful on other flooring materials and treat them with the respect they deserve. Well stone is no different, it needs love and respect too. So take off your shoes and put your slippers on, that way you cannot carry harmful grit onto the floor.

3. Over-Mopping

Some folk just seem to want to wash their floor to death. The more you clean with strong detergents and don't rinse effectively, (see point #6), the more chance of leaving residues that make the floor look dull and lifeless. Most often, all that is needed is some regular dry cleaning or sweeping, with a soft brush or micro-fibre floor duster and/or vacuuming. This will also help keep grit off the floor.

4. Not attending to Spills and Accidents right away

Somehow, we tend to treat hard stone floors differently to say carpet or wood. If, for example, we have a very expensive carpet and we spill something on it, like a glass of wine for instance, would we sit and watch it become a stain? I don't think so. Even if that carpet has some kind of stain protection on it, we know that it will only buy us some 'time to react', so we rush off to the kitchen for the towels.

Well guess what, providing 'reaction time' is all sealers do for stone. Just like the carpet, if we spill something we should absorb it up straight away, especially if it is something like wine or some other acidic liquid. We don't spill 'stains' we spill contaminants, it is when we leave the contaminant for a length of time to penetrate the stone, that they become stains. If the floor is sealed with a good sealer, we just get a bit more reaction time. Many stains would be prevented by taking care of spills and accidents as the happen.

5. Wrong choice of cleaner for routine cleaning

It is all too easy to buy an off the shelf floor cleaner from the super markets. However, most of these are strong de-greasers, high ph cleaners intended to deep clean really grubby floors. Furthermore, there is a natural human tendency to ignore instructions and make it extra strong, if it says add one capful per bucket, how many of us have added another one just for luck? There are reasons for these instructions and dilution rates but even more important, there is absolutely no need to use such chemicals for every day or weekly cleaning.

When the floor does need a quick wash (and if we take note of the first 4 points then this might not have to be too often) no problem, we just need to make sure to use a neutral cleaner, that is one with a ph value of around 7 to 8. There are plenty of them out there, all designed to clean gently with no harmful effect on the floor or on any sealer or finish that may be applied.

6. Just carrying on with the same old routine

Every now and then, the floor needs a bit of intensive care. In the business we call this a 'Periodic Deep-Clean' - From time to time the floor will need a deeper, more labour-intensive clean. This is the time to use those high alkaline cleaners. However, try to use one that is designed for stone instead of simply reaching for the cheapest supermarket brand (we are only doing this once or twice per year so no need to penny-pinch).

The key word here is dwell time - these cleaners need to be left on the floor for a period of time - 5 to 15 minutes on average. The biggest mistake people make here is to just mop the floor with the high ph detergent. Ignore dwell time and you waste your time and effort. The cleaners need time to work. Then they need to be agitated, or scrubbed, remember we are not doing this every week, just a couple of times per year so we can afford the time to do it properly. Note, this type of cleaner may have an impact on any sealer used, so check first; you may need to top up the sealer afterwords. This brings us onto the biggest mistake of all(it is also the easiest one to correct).

7. Not Rinsing the floor after washing

This is one of the most important, yet most overlooked aspects of floor cleaning. It does not matter how much effort we put into cleaning, nor how powerful the cleaning-chemical, if we leave dirty water lying on the floor, when it dries, we will have residues. Think about what we have just done: we put a strong chemical on the floor; we let it sit (dwell time) so it has started to break down the ingrained dirt; we scrubbed - to loosen more dirt and allow the cleaner to penetrate deeper.

Then what tends to happen is we push all this around with a mop, occasionally rinse the mop in water that by now has long since ceased being fresh or clean, and we put the only partially cleaned mop, back on the floor to spread more grungy water around. Sure, some of the dirt is transferred into the mop bucket, but plenty gets left behind. In addition to the dirt (some of which is now broken down and finer, so it can get deeper into the floor, especially the grout joints) we also leave behind detergent residue. This combination of residue and partially emulsified grime quickly builds up to leave a dull patina on the stone and is one of the main reasons grout lines go dark and grubby so quickly.

The remedy is easy, after washing the floor, go change the dirty water that contains the detergent, rinse out the bucket and the mop and fill the bucket with fresh, clean water. Now, go over the floor again with just that clean water. If it is a big floor, you may need to change the rinse water again, perhaps more than once - but do it as it will save you time in the long run.

8. Leaving the floor wet

Have you noticed what happens to glass windows after washing if they are just left to dry naturally? Streaks and smears. Many stone floors are smooth or even polished and as a result they can behave in the exact same way as glass. So, after rinsing the floor, it is good practice to dry the floor down with an absorbent cotton towel or a micro-fiber cloth. Buffing floors dry like this (either by hand or with a machine, depending on the size of your floor) will remove the remaining moisture (and any stray smudges that may have been missed).

9. Ignoring Little Stains

If we do not react fast enough to spills (mistake #4) we can end up with a stain. If we continually ignore that stain, and the next one and so on, pretty soon the floor can look deeply ingrained and generally grubby. For isolated small stains try a localized poultice stain remover.

10. Confusing Etch Marks With Stains

When an acid sensitive stone floor, such as polished marble is exposed to an acidic contaminant, such as red wine, the result is often both a stain (the red colour) and an etch mark. An etch-mark is what happens when something acidic erodes away the fine polished surface of [typically] calcium-based stones. It is often confused with a stain because it is so often accompanied by one. The acid basically burns new holes in the stone, those holes were not there before, so no sealer could have got into them, Also, most polished floors use impregnating sealers which work below the surface and so offer no protection against acids at the surface itself.

The way to spot an etch mark is to clean the 'stain' (deep clean or poultice for example) then after rinsing and allowing the floor to dry check where the stain was. If the stain has now gone, but in its place is a dull spot often with a rougher feel (compared to the polished surface) and a whiter or bleached (less colour anyway) appearance, then this is an etch-mark. If we now ignore this damage (because that is what it is, physical damage to the stone surface) then it will leave the stone more vulnerable to staining (the surface is now more textured so it will tend to hold dirt more readily, it is also less dense, and so potentially more absorbent and any sealer will have been compromised). Small and localized etching can be quickly repaired with a hand applied re-polishing cream, larger scale etching will probably require the services of a stone floor professional.

11. Using Home Remedies and Natural Acids

We have all heard family elders, and TV experts rave about old home made remedies for cleaning. Please, don't listen to them, period. The reason I take such a strong stance on this is that I have seen the results. The wonderful, versatile powers of household products like vinegar and lemon juice are forever being suggested for all manor of cleaning, and yes they can work. They work by virtue of being acidic and will break down a number of minerals (lime scale on tiles for example).

The problem is they kill the surface of calcium-based and other acid sensitive stones (marble, limestone, travertine to name but a few). Not only have I seen entire floors ruined, the surface completely etched, but they also stain the floor. After doing such as great job of removing the polish, they then add their own colour or hue to the now much more porous floor.

Lemon juice and vinegar belong in the larder or pantry, not the cleaning cupboard.

12. Neglecting the Seal

Don't assume that just because your stone floor was sealed during installation, that it still has an effective seal in place two years on. It might have, but during that time, the floor will have had a fair bit of traffic and it has most probably been subjected to a variety of cleaning chemicals. It is advisable to check the integrity of the sealer periodically. For a coating type sealer I would suggest checking about every 6 to 12 months, for an impregnator every 12 to 24 months.

The way to do this is to drop some water onto the floor and leave it for say 10 minutes. If it goes in quickly and darkens the stone, then when wiped away it leaves a wet patch, then it would be advisable to top up the sealer. If the water does not go into the stone except for a feint surface shadow, it is probably fine for now.

The mistakes mentioned here are pretty easy to avoid. With a bit of care and attention, maintaining a stone floor should be very easy indeed.