QI followed your advice of a couple of weeks ago (“How to remove a rust stain on a shower floor,” June 24) and successfully used CLR to remove rust stains from limestone (I think) tile. However, the CLR also removed the tile’s finish, a slight sheen, not high gloss. Is there a product you would recommend to restore the finish?
CLR is an acidic rust remover. Although it is safe to use on a plastic shower floor (the situation faced by the reader who wrote in initially), it can etch some types of stone. For that reason, the manufacturer recommends against using it on any natural stone, including limestone. A nonacidic rust remover, such as Lithofin Rust-EX, $19.95 at www.mystonecare.com, would have been more appropriate.
The sheen on stone tiles isn’t created by adding a shiny coating; it results from polishing the stone with finer and finer abrasives. Acidic rust removers ruin the shine because they eat away some of the surface, leaving it too rough to reflect as much light as before.
To re-smoothe relatively soft stones such as limestone, you can buy a product such as Etch Remover ProKit for Marble, Travertine, & Limestone ($34.95 at www.mystonecare.com) or MB Stone Care’s Marble Polishing Powder ($25.45 at www.mbstonecare.com). These contain a superfine abrasive that you rub on with a cloth. But these products can repolish only stone with superficial damage. They won’t work if you run a fingernail across the surface and feel a crater or even just roughness. And if the stone didn’t have a highly polished surface, they can make the repaired area too shiny. In that case, instructions with the ProKit product recommend evening out the sheen by dampening the area and sanding with 800-grit wet-dry sandpaper.
Because your tile didn’t have a hig-gloss finish to begin with, you might skip the repair kit and just buy fine sandpaper in several grits, maybe 240, 400, 600 and 800. Starting with the finest grit, test-sand a small area to see what matches the existing finish, then sand the entire tile or tiles with the damage. Dampen the tile first, to add lubrication.
When our house was built, we chose the cottage look using cedar shakes. The shakes were painted with a 100 percent acrylic product. It must have soaked into the raw cedar shakes well because we have not had to repaint the shakes now for 15 years. That being said, I have noticed that a couple of spots exposed to afternoon sun are starting to show signs of discoloration. However, the house as a whole still looks good. Should I clean and repaint the affected shakes, or should I repaint the entire house?
Spot repainting makes sense when a falling tree branch or other accident scrapes off the paint. But trying to touch up just the sun-damaged shingles for purely cosmetic reasons could become an exercise in futility. Your touch-ups will show, so the overall effect could be the same blotchiness you have now, just in a darker array of colors.
The problem is that even the paint that doesn’t appear to be bleached now will probably look bleached once it is next to shingles with fresh paint. The sun and weather exposure may have been less on the shingles you don’t repaint, but it wasn’t absent.
One solution is to repaint a whole wall or a section where there is an obvious break, such as where a wall bumps out. Light reflects differently depending on angles, so there shouldn’t be anything odd-looking about a slight difference in color from one wall to another. But repainting now, or in the next year or two, makes a lot of sense. Fifteen years is a good run for an exterior paint job. If you wait until the paint begins to peel, repainting will be more problematic and costly.
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