Travertine Bathroom Sealing

Hi...I've just put in a new bathroom using travertine tiles on the floor, walls and shower. They are honed and filled. I am hearing mixed opinions on whether or not I should seal it. Even reading through your website has confused me a little bit. In addition to that, what do you recommend is the best way to keep the shower tiles at their cleanest? Someone even said we should no longer use bar soap because it will cause a heavy film at the lower half of the shower walls (??) If you suggest sealing it, can you please recommend the best product to use. Thank you very much.

 

Dear Pegeen:

Hone-finished travertine may (and only may) take some sealer in. But it would be marginal at best anyway, and the benefits coming from the sealing would be pretty much immaterial. Unless, of course, you plan to spill coffee or cooking oil in your shower stall and let them sit there until eventually they will find their way inside the stone...

Especially when it comes to a shower stall, the last thing that you want to concern yourself about is the sealing of the stone. The most important factor to be really concerned about is the installation. If the installation is not done according the precise standards, you could seal your stall until you drop, but you still will have an installation failure; because it is not by applying a product that's only meant to reduce the likelihood of staining that you will ever solve any real structural problem, should you have one.

Second in importance is the routine care, which, as it should be intuitive, it is vastly more important than trying to prevent some very improbable coffee or cooking oil stain! As you can tell by reading many of this site's postings, you're not likely to get good information about routine care from your dealer or installer. Take the soap build up, for instance. Yes, of course, over use you will have some soap build-up. And so what?... Can it not be cleaned? Does soap build-up only happens on stone stalls? How about the soap build-up that you have in a ceramic tiles stall, or a fiberglass stall?... What so scary about it? Don't become another statistic! By logging into the Helpful Hints section of our website at:   http://www.mbstone.com/HH_promo/helpful_hints.htm , you will be able to get the short version of our maintenance guidelines at no charge. The full version of it – a 7-page document considered by many as an industry benchmark – is available in pay-per-download format in our Educational Literature section at:   http://www.mbstone.com/literature/literature.htm .  

And remember, every single penny of the cost of the literature will be used to support this site and its cause: your cause.

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