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I can't believe my self build has come to this...


divorcingjack

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I have just found myself weeing on a limestone tile sample. It's a new low. 

 

In my defence, it was part of an extensive testing regime to see if they will work in our bathrooms, and we have a 6 year old with poor aim and a baby. Anyone got real life experience of living with honed grey limestone? 

 

 

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2 minutes ago, divorcingjack said:

I have just found myself weeing on a limestone tile sample. It's a new low. 

 

In my defence, it was part of an extensive testing regime to see if they will work in our bathrooms, and we have a 6 year old with poor aim and a baby. Anyone got real life experience of living with honed grey limestone? 

 

 

we had a client who insisted on using limestone for the walkway around a new internal swimming pool on a £5M house extension. This is usually a big No-No for obvious reasons but the wife was insistent and wouldn't listen to technical reasons. We had the limestone sealed and wrote to the them with advice regarding maintenance.

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1 hour ago, divorcingjack said:

limestone

Now if I recall my chemistry then it (Calcium Carbonate) reacts with loads of stuff which is why having it about might be seen as a problem, and if you use too much limescale cleaner you can get some interesting effects. We did our downstairs wet room at millstone manor 15 years ago with it on the walls as large honed tile and on the floor as rough mosaic and they both still look great I think mainly because cleaning it is so easy, just take the shower head out of its holder and spray the room with it  - I also do the WC and the sink at the same time, avoiding the ceiling light fittings of course,  and then wipe it off, great.

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50 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

Now if I recall my chemistry then it (Calcium Carbonate) reacts with loads of stuff which is why having it about might be seen as a problem, and if you use too much limescale cleaner you can get some interesting effects. We did our downstairs wet room at millstone manor 15 years ago with it on the walls as large honed tile and on the floor as rough mosaic and they both still look great I think mainly because cleaning it is so easy, just take the shower head out of its holder and spray the room with it  - I also do the WC and the sink at the same time, avoiding the ceiling light fittings of course,  and then wipe it off, great.

 

 

Yes, chemically the same as limescale CaCO3, so any cleaning product for limescale will attack it, as will any acid, like the very weak acidity of urine (urine is usually has a pH of something like 6 to 7 in healthy people, IIRC, so varies from being slightly acidic to neutral).

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43 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Yes, chemically the same as limescale CaCO3, so any cleaning product for limescale will attack it, as will any acid, like the very weak acidity of urine (urine is usually has a pH of something like 6 to 7 in healthy people, IIRC, so varies from being slightly acidic to neutral).

 

Yes, it can be a bit of pain - we have had house with limestone/marble in the bathrooms and porcelain tiles elsewhere. We had to have two sets of cleaning materials - one for the marble and one for other finishes.  We had a cleaner that had to be constantly reminded which cleaning materials to be used on which surface

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Worked on a theater and in the backstage area we wanted very durable dressing room worktops. No matter what manufactures tell you about easy to clean surfaces they're mostly designed for food based stuff like wine, coffee, sauces, etc. I gave samples of different products to the girls in our office and all products failed when attached with makeup. Ended up going with an industrial vinyl floor covering on the worktops.

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Another thing I've found out the hard way is that orange juice attacks travertine floors (travertine being calcite, a polymorph of CaCO3, calcium carbonate, or limestone).  I have put three coats of silicone sealant on our flooring, but there is one spot where a drip of orange juice fell on it that has a rough depression where the citric acid has dissolved the surface. 

 

I've found that travertine chips and damage like this can be repaired very well with a mix of powdered travertine and epoxy resin as a filler.  I created some travertine dust with the belt sander, painted some neat epoxy resin into the damaged area, then applied a very stiff mix of travertine dust and resin to it.  When the epoxy has partially cured, the surface can be levelled up with a Stanley knife blade, and when the epoxy is fully cured it can be polished up with a scotchbrite pad.  Not sure it the same principle would work with limestone or not, but I know that some famous stalactites (which are also calcite) in a cave in South Wales ( Ogof Ffynnon Ddu) were repaired with epoxy back in the 1980s and now you can't see the repair, as fresh calcite has formed over the glued joints.

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47 minutes ago, divorcingjack said:

That would be a completely different kind of programme....

:D 

On 05/09/2018 at 09:01, divorcingjack said:

it was part of an extensive testing regime to see if they will work in our bathrooms, and we have a 6 year old with poor aim and a baby. Anyone got real life experience of living with honed grey limestone? 

Ok. The one that will burn it like fire is vomit. My daughter threw up over my beautiful travertine and it near destroyed it, in the few minutes it was there before I could stop heaving long enough to clean it up :S. Remind me why we had 4 kids :/ 

Pee all over it all day long, its fine, but dont puke over it whatever you do. 

You heard it here first folks !  

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uuurghh, tequila is the one that will make me puke. Bad student experience. I'm sure that was the night someone got run over by the ambulance that came to pick someone else up! They wouldn't listen to the argument that it was the best possible vehicle to be run over by... :S

 

Puke does worry me, tbh. Would that be covered under "accidental damage"? How possible is it to potentially remove a few tiles and replace? We're thinking of doing all the bathrooms in it, so it's not like we could even have a "puke bathroom". Teenage parties ... noooo! 

 

Might take a tip from that tequila party - they had all the floors covered in that plastic sticky stuff that they use at crime scenes. Good planning to secure the deposit. 

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  • 2 months later...
On 05/09/2018 at 09:01, divorcingjack said:

I have just found myself weeing on a limestone tile sample. It's a new low. 

 

In my defence, it was part of an extensive testing regime to see if they will work in our bathrooms, and we have a 6 year old with poor aim and a baby. Anyone got real life experience of living with honed grey limestone? 

 

 

 

If you *really* want to test this, you need to get a camel to wee on it. 

 

urine-concentration.thumb.jpg.a05e54a4f464187a1b18f9ff926d5cf5.jpg

 

Or - more boringly - Tibbles the Cat.

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