When you want a beautiful and luxurious feel to your bathroom, you invest in a natural stone shower. Travertine is a popular tile choice because it adds elegance to a room and its neutral color palette matches most home styles.
But the main travertine shower problem for South Houston homeowners is how to keep them looking fresh and beautiful — even with daily use.
What if there was a way to help take the headache out of caring for the travertine in your shower? Well, there is. Professionally sealing your grout and tile surfaces is the solution for keeping your travertine pristine, as the luxurious investment you meant it to be.
1. Saves You Time and Elbow Grease
Cleaning your shower tile can be one of the biggest headaches in homecare. While you use a shower to clean yourself, that shower becomes filled with dirt, grime, and soap scum that rinses over its surface.
Having your shower tile sealed makes the cleaning process far easier. It will reduce the cleaning time and cut the amount of elbow grease needed to get your shower tile thoroughly cleaned.
Instead of having to scrub out scum and stains, cleaning will involve easily wiping down your shower’s tile with a natural stone cleaner and watching its surface look beautiful again.
2. Reduced Mold Growth
Mold is more likely to appear in moist areas. No place harbors more excess moisture than your bathroom, in particular, your showers. Your shower is therefore prone to experiencing the onset of mold and mildew.
Travertine and the grout surrounding it are both porous substances. They harbor bacteria and moisture in their pores. But this is where sealing steps in.
Sealers help to create a protective barrier over your natural stone tile to keep water and debris from collecting and producing mold. Without moisture absorption, mold cannot grow or thrive.
3. Makes Your Shower Stone More Sanitary
By creating a seal over your shower, protecting it from mold growth and dirt collection, your tile stays more sanitary. Unsealed tile harbors bacteria that your at-home cleanings are unable to properly remove.
Wiping down your surfaces will only do so much to lift dirt and bacteria from tiled areas. Even using an abrasive object like baking soda to lift dirt and clean grout can only penetrate so far. Sealing is the only way to effectively keep the filth out of the pores in travertine and its grout.
4. Prevents the Onset of Stains
Travertine is prone to staining for the same reason it is prone to mold growth— pores. As a natural, porous stone, travertine absorbs liquids and can become discolored and stained.
As these stains set in, they can become difficult or even impossible to remove. But sealer protects your stone from penetrating stains, making them easier to remove and keeping them from ever having the opportunity to discolor your travertine or the surrounding grout.
5. Prevents Etching
As a natural stone, travertine can be prone to etching. Etching is the creation of dull spots on natural stone due to chemical reactions between the natural stone’s makeup and acidic substances. Natural stone has a certain luster to it, but certain cleaning agents and products that come in contact with its surface can eat away at your stone and cause it to dull and, in severe cases, even cause the texture of the stone to change.
Sealer provides a layer over the stone to keep these substances from causing etching, which can sometimes be irreversible.
6. Makes Your Travertine Tile Last
Sealing keeps you from needing excessive grout and tile replacements and restorations. By protecting your tile from dirt and stains, your tile will last longer. Having grout sealed also helps to keep the bonding of grout intact instead of being scrubbed away by harsh products and abrasive methods over time.
Having your tile sealed is not a super expensive process, but having to replace grout and tile can be extremely expensive. Sealing tile preserves your tile and saves you money.
How Often Should I Seal My Shower Tile?
Most residential showers undergo multiple uses every day. Because of this, shower tile sealings wear down faster than other tiled areas of the home. And because the sealer can wear down and showers have an abundance of moisture, soap scum, and dirt continually coating their surface, you should have your South Houston shower professionally resealed annually.
However, if you notice your tile absorbing moisture, discoloring, or the grout becoming significantly dirty, you should have your tile professionally cleaned and sealed sooner than a year.
While you can purchase DIY sealers at the store, nothing can coat your travertine natural stone the way a professional grout and tile company can.
The benefit of hiring a professional is that they can effectively clean your tile before applying the new sealer, leaving you with like-new tile that is easier to clean and won’t absorb the filth in your shower.
Protect Your South Houston Tile with a Professional Sealing
When you want to quit worrying about your travertine shower and simply start enjoying its beauty, having a professional grout and tile sealing can help give you all the benefits above. At Houston Groutsmith, our team’s goal is to see you enjoying your home, not stressing over its care.
Check out the value Houston Groutsmith offers for professional grout and tile sealing services in the South Houston and Sugar Land areas. You’ll see common problems most homeowners look to us to solve, and see before and after pictures of how we helped them protect their grout and tile. When you are ready to seal your tile, look to our team for a free demo and estimate.