Subject: RE: [sccpartners] black marble/ color enhancing sealer?

Barry-how bad a condition are these walls in anyway.Are you going to hone and repolish

the walls. I just looked at some commercial bathrooms in nyc.fancy place with polished st. laurant bathrooms. They were trashed(not one stain) (9000 etches) - managemant wanted to repolish and seal.(what would stain a wall in a fancy bathroom anyway?)

I told them I would do whatever they wanted but they might as well book me in advance monthly to keep those areas polished. I suggeted they hone the bathrooms and color enhance them. It made big sense to them. If your customers bathrooms are in that bad a shape and the stone would look good color enhanced, it may be a possibility. If you seal the walls and they get etched again or whatever your customer may want to have you redo them because he thinks the sealer failed. I feel it is better to educate them to the fact they spec'd out the wrong material for a bathroom period.

And theres more!,

I just honed and polished a large area of bottocino walls soiled from air pollution,smoke,and some paint.
We were able to restore the walls removing all the soils and polishing to a high luster.

The client wanted to seal the walls which we tested for porosity.We found that using a wet towel, spray bottle and short of bring in the fire department we couldn't get that wall to absorb a drop. I informed the client that he didnt need to seal these walls. It took a bit to explain to him that after many years of accumulated soils on that wall it was only on the surface. I also believed that if these walls had been sealed from the beginning without proper maintenance it would have been just as soiled. I have worked on a lot of bottocino new and old, walls and floors(polished and honed) and cant remember one stain that had to be poulticed out.

Isnt it true that bottocino is very dense and when polished the amount of sealer it would absorb is negligible. Consider this stone on a wall in a lobby and think about what stainig agents could stain this wall. 

I told him it was more important to develop a routine in house maintenance program regarding the walls on say a quarterly basis.

They agreed.

I realize that I could have probably made some extra bucks by telling them it had to be sealed. 
What troubles me is if they did some simple research on the web they could possibly consider that I conned them on the sealing job. I couldn't sell myself on sealing their walls and many others I could have sealed as well but didn't.

I have a friend of mine who is a fabricator and he seals everything in sight. He could care less if it is porous or not. We talk about this from time to time and he doesnt care about the science behind sealing. I have done four or five sealer removal jobs for him. He specializes in sealing black absolute. I did one not too long ago removed alot of sealer from black absolute, had a whole conversation(with the homeowner) about sealing stones that aren't porous.

Wouldn't you know as we were packing up the homeowner wanted to know if we were sealing it before we left.

So someone please tell me do we seal everything in sight and charge for it or do we approach this in a logical scientific way based on the requirements of every individual stone.

Our customers pay alot for our services and most of us have survived though tough economic times.

Dont we owe our customers a square deal. 

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 3:59 PM, John Freitag <jfreitag@thestoneandtileschool.com> wrote: