Modern Stone Care

We are Houston's premiere natural stone cleaning and restoration service. Our natural stone services include cleaning, polishing, honing and sealing all natural stone hard surfaces used today in the Houston area. This includes flooring, countertops, and showers. Our floor cleaning services utilize the most appropriate cleaning processes in the industry today. We polish marble, travertine and limestone, creating a highly reflective surface, or we can hone those stones down to a matte finish. We clean and seal slate, flagstone, sandstone and many other natural stones used for interior flooring or exterior patios and pool surrounds.

Modern Stone Care is an insured, certified natural stone restoration, and tile cleaning company. We began servicing the Houston area in 2009. We have also been serving the community over 40 years combined as local firefighters. We have been expertly trained to meet and exceed all industry standards in stone care and maintenance. We carefully analyze each prospective project so that we can give advice on what our customers need. We take the time to listen to our clients, so that we can give them what they want.

Ceramic and porcelain tiles are manmade tiles that are impervious to penetration due to the fact that they are fired under high heat to shrink out the moisture and glazed over to create a totally sealed floor. They resist acids as well as any natural stone and better than most. Because of this, we can use either an acidic cleaning solution or an alkaline cleaning solution to clean the tile. Which one we use will depend upon each floor. Sometimes, using one or the other is not enough and both types of cleaners need to be used.

Granite does not have an acid sensitivity as the calcareous stones like marble, limestone and travertine have. We often still use alkaline cleaning solutions on granite because of the fact that alkaline cleaners emulsify dirt better than acids. If the granite floor has a sanded grout component, we often will clean the floor with an alkaline solution and then follow up with a second step in the cleaning procedure. We will use an acid to clean the grout when it is deemed safe and necessary to get stains in the grout to release.

A polished marble floor will scratch very easily compared to a harder stone like granite. Sand, which has a hardness rating of 7 on Moh's Scale will scratch marble if it walked onto as most marble has a hardness rating of about 3. The reflectivity after polishing marble is caused by natural crystals in the stone. When sediment and grit are walked, dragged or scraped across the stone, the crystals become damaged and the surface is not longer even, causing a loss of reflectivity and shine. It is important to protect your marble with good barrier matting as a preventive step.

Due to its acid sensitivity, limestone must be cleaned using an alkaline cleaning solution. We give the solution approximately 20 minutes of dwell time. This gives the cleaner time to emulsify the dirt that is embedded into the stone and grout. We then use an industry accepted spinner tool which provides pressure coupled with vacuum for extraction. This process also removes dirt from the top of your grout lines. This is the industry recommended method to clean stone and tile floors. Due to its alkaline mineral content, limestone etches whenever an acidic liquid or other compound comes in contact with the surface of the stone.