Resources / Stone Care
Keep your natural stone surfaces looking pristine for decades with our expert natural stone care guide — covering daily cleaning, sealing, and stain removal for every stone type.
Granite GuideQuartzite GuideMarble Guide
| Stone Type | Seal Frequency |
|---|---|
| Granite | Every 1–3 years |
| Quartzite | Every 6–12 months |
| Marble | Every 3–6 months |
| Travertine | Every 6–12 months |
| Slate | Every 1–2 years |
💡 Test: Drop water on the surface. If it beads up, you’re protected. If it absorbs, it’s time to seal.
☕
Blot immediately — never rub. Apply baking soda paste mixed with hydrogen peroxide, cover with plastic wrap for 24 hours. Rinse and reseal.
🛢️
Apply talc powder or baking soda to absorb. Let sit for 24 hours. Clean with pH-neutral degreaser and warm water. May need multiple applications.
🍋
Etching is surface damage, not a stain. For marble, use marble polishing powder to buff out. For severe etching, call a professional stone restorer.
🖊️
For light-colored stone: use acetone or hydrogen peroxide. For dark stone: use lacquer thinner. Always test in an inconspicuous area first.
Natural stone care is not one routine. Granite is igneous and dense, marble and dolomite are calcareous and react to acid, and quartzite sits between them: as hard as granite but often more porous than people expect. The same cleaner that is fine on one will etch the other, so the first step is knowing which material is actually on your counter.
If you bought the slab from us, the material and finish are on the tag and on your invoice. If you inherited the stone with the house, a drop of lemon juice in an out-of-the-way corner tells you a lot: if it dulls the surface within a few minutes, you are looking at a calcareous stone and it wants gentler treatment.
These get confused constantly, and the fix is different. A stain is something absorbed into the stone, so it sits below the surface and usually lifts with a poultice. Etching is a chemical burn on the surface itself, most often from lemon, vinegar, wine or a bathroom cleaner, and no amount of scrubbing removes it because there is nothing to remove. Light etching on a polished surface is repolished; on a honed surface it often disappears with a little care.
Sealer does not make stone bulletproof. It buys you time between a spill landing and the spill soaking in. The water test settles the question: leave a tablespoon of water on the counter for fifteen minutes, and if the stone darkens where it sat, it is ready to be sealed. Dense granites can go years; some quartzites and most marbles want it more often.
Outdoors in Texas, UV and heat rule out engineered quartz and favor granite or a dense quartzite. In bathrooms the enemy is not heat but cosmetics: toothpaste, perfume and acidic cleaners do more damage to a vanity top than anything in a kitchen. Natural stone care in a bathroom is mostly about what you leave sitting on the counter overnight.
The Natural Stone Institute publishes the technical standards the industry works to, including test methods for absorption and abrasion, and it is the right place to check a claim a cleaner manufacturer makes. The U.S. Geological Survey covers how dimension stone is quarried and classified if you want to understand why one block behaves differently from another.
Call us before you experiment. Most of the permanent damage we see was caused by a well-meant repair rather than the original spill. We sell the material and we know what each block does, so we can usually tell you whether a mark will lift, needs a poultice, or wants a professional repolish.
Engineered quartz has its own routine; see Quartz & Engineered Stone Care. To see what is on the ground today, browse Live Inventory or the Natural Stone range.
Read our complete Quartz & Engineered Stone care guide — different rules apply for engineered surfaces.
Direct from the quarry, curated for your space. Texas-based and locally owned, offering premium natural stone, quartz & stone crafts at wholesale pricing.
© 2026 KJM Stones. All rights reserved.
